FWIW, the reason the word 'claimed' was used in this story was that the article references two studies - one which suggests violence and games are related, and the other suggesting that games don't predispose violent behavior. In other words, it's not completely crystal-clear.
"The 30 eighth- and ninth-grade girls at the camp, some from as far away as New York, used the skills they accumulated to design video games, which they presented on Friday in a game fair held at the camp's culmination."
And who's modding up someone called 'irc.goatse.cx troll'? Honestly, who throws a shoe?
I didn't post this in the article, cos I had to find it from a few different sources, but:
This thumbnail index on EBGames.com clearly has a red-striped Greatest Hits version of the Kingdom Hearts box. The Kingdom Hearts page used to have it too, but they changed it back.
Also, last month Amazon.com accidentally released Greatest Hits packaging for Ratchet & Clank, Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, ATV Offroad Fury 2, SOCOM: US Navy SEALs. I also found an obscure release list or two listing Sly Cooper for Greatest Hits release in September.
If anyone can find all of this info in one place, with actual release dates, it'd be great.
FWIW, I actually emailed the guys running this site before posting the story, to see if they could mirror it somewhere other than Geocities, and they said they'd signed up for some kind of bandwidth deal which meant the site had no bandwidth cap.
But they do pay extra for each GB over their monthly limit, so hopefully a subpage Slashdotting won't actually cost 'em much cash. Wacky.
Very interesting analysis indeed - but I believe that UbiSoft bought the rights to all the old Might and Magic games, even those that have already been developed, and which they can essentially now sell without sinking much/any new money into them. That's good for starters. And the Might and Magic name still has some prestige value, and if you figure that you can pay up to $5 million just for the right license, then paying $1 million to get your own intellectual property/license forever seems half-decent.
I think everyone got very good deals out of this, actually, considering the average game costs $3-5 million dollars, especially Microsoft, who got a respected and fully-developed baseball franchise for under $500,000 - crazy.
I think it depends how you spin it - sales are up from the previous quarter, but slightly down from the same quarter the previous year. That can be read as either bad, or good, depending on whether you're Reuters looking for a good angle or GameStop looking to hype financial results.
Actually, this post was from CowboyNeal, who is a sophisticated Pokemon fan, not a sophisticated Swingerz Golf fan like myself. There, that's much better, isn't it?:)
It's worth mentioning again - if you don't appreciate the amount of Games stories you're seeing on the main page when you log in, it's because you have 'collapse all sections' ticked in the 'Homepage' part of your preferences, and you're seeing all the stories posted on the Slashdot Games subpage on your mainpage. If you untick the 'collapse all sections' tickbox, or alternately, exclude games-related stories by topic or section, this should help your non-games-related Slashdot enjoyment a lot.
It's news, imho, because it's a newly posted article (as of last night), which, I believe, is the first time someone has taken screenshots from a prototype ROM to illustrate the changes originally discussed in the Wired article. I certainly haven't seen it before.
But we'd love people to submit as many games-specific posts as possible, yes. Please do!
This is probably worth mentioning again - if you're upset over the amount of games posts you see on the main page of Slashdot, then you're probably logged on and have ticked the 'collapse sections' box in your preferences. On average, we post less than one Games post a day on the main page - the vast majority of these posts are subsection-specific.
So you can either turn off 'collapse sections' in your preferences, and check out the other sections by using the sidebar, or just exclude posts by topic (games-related) or author in the same preferences. Hope this helps.
Busted. Comments duly noted, and I think I agree this story ended up over-editorializing to punch up a dry set of figures.
On another topic, what do people think the GameCube price difference means? Considering GameCube doesn't really have an official $19.99 greatest hits line (though it does have a Player's Choice line for $29.99), I thought that a little odd.
Looks like the Oscar bot is actually available to talk to via a chat interface as part of the TriadCity website here. You can now be impressed at his witticisms or just plain irked at him from the comfort of your web browser, yay.
I wasn't positive about this either, but according to this site, "While they are an independent company, HAL Laboratory can still be considered a Nintendo second-party developer due to their [close] relationship."
Actually, I talked to a reporter at CNN Money before posting this correction, because I tried mailing him to correct _his_ story, which said 80,000, and we looked at all the online sources and came to the conclusion that 80,000 seems to be correct.
To explain, that's how many GameCubes Nintendo sold to retailers in that period - not how many GameCubes were sold. So if Nintendo had already sold 1,000,000 GameCubes to retailers in the previous quarter, but the retailers only sold 500,000 of the previous quarter, and then this quarter, the retailers sold 580,000, then.. Nintendo would have only sold 80,000 consoles to retailers this quarter. Slightly odd, but conceivably correct.
Ah, I've got it now. What happened is that Warcry, for some not-so-smart reason, always use the same URL for the latest version of Warthog's column. So the previous Slashdot article now links there too, even though there are two different articles.
I've now fixed the URL in this story, so it at least points to the original review, which now has an different, archived URL on the Warcry site. How confusing.
In this case, if the site went down, it was probably a combined Penny Arcade (who featured the project this morning) and Slashdot Games effect, since this isn't actually a mainpage post. From my very un-scientific pokings, I've noticed that a Slashdot Games-only post can generate enough traffic to kill some smaller sites, but on its own, relatively rarely smashes better-hosted webpages.
I've seen the game widely reported as being out of Rockstar North (actual GTA developers), and at one point I found the game on a release list from two or three years back, when they were still called DMA Design. So personally, that's why it intrigues me. We'll see.
Actually, I admit I might have been annoyed if I'd paid full-price for it - I picked it up recently when it had gone down to $30, and that seemed fairer for a title that's pretty much an acquired taste:P
I actually have to stick up for DoA:Xtreme Beach Volleyball. Have any of you guys actually played it?
So sure, it's a little on the voyeuristic side. But I find the volleyball itself pretty addictive, the casino mini-games _really_ addictive, and the 'dating game' side of things (deciding which girls to give presents to, and which girls to court as your volleyball partner) kinda neat. Plus, collecting things is always a good gameplay spur, and there's a whole bunch of crazed things to collect, from, yes, swimsuits, all the way to prototype Xbox consoles, videos of previous Team Ninja titles, and more.
Oddly, when I showed it to a bunch of my friends recently, everyone was fascinated, gender notwithstanding. There's something about its extreme quirkiness that transcends crass.
But, uhm, YMMV. Definitely, YMMV.:) And Creepy Crawler, there's no nude cheat, but there is a nude hack which requires you to have modded your Xbox.
We've actually covered the Intellivision TV Game, about a month back, and as mentioned in the article, covered the Atari 10-in-1 Game last year, but hadn't seen the lack of the Adventure easter-egg widely reported in the press, so thought it relevant - I wonder if they put a different message back in for later versions of the hardware, as opposed to 'TEXT', which definitely seems like an unfinished mistake?
Actually, turns out that there were only about 30,000 copies of Viewtiful Joe printed, according to some online reports - so the sell-out, although sounding impressive, isn't quite as impressive as it might sound. Still, if it keeps selling out..
.hack//SIGN and virtual lawlessness.
on
To Kill An Avatar
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Didn't put it in the main post cos it's a tad off-topic, but I just started watching Bandai's.hack//SIGN TV show on Cartoon Network, and there's some really interesting discussions of lawlessness in virtual worlds in that (seeing as it takes place in a MMORPG n' all.) It's an intriguing and thoughtprovoking show - do you go in a MMORPG to have fun however you want, even if it means being 'bad', or is imposing order necessary for the majority to have fun? That seemed to be one of the questions they tackled.
Thanks for pointing this out - I've amended the post a little to reflect this. I'm not entirely sure why Pokemon would be listed separately - is it counted as a separate company from Nintendo?
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, the reason the word 'claimed' was used in this story was that the article references two studies - one which suggests violence and games are related, and the other suggesting that games don't predispose violent behavior. In other words, it's not completely crystal-clear.
From the article linked in the story:
"The 30 eighth- and ninth-grade girls at the camp, some from as far away as New York, used the skills they accumulated to design video games, which they presented on Friday in a game fair held at the camp's culmination."
And who's modding up someone called 'irc.goatse.cx troll'? Honestly, who throws a shoe?
Hmm. The GameSpy preview has a bunch of screenshots attached. The UXO Stratics page has a big screenshots archive. Not sure there's a lack of screenshots to complain about?
I didn't post this in the article, cos I had to find it from a few different sources, but:
This thumbnail index on EBGames.com clearly has a red-striped Greatest Hits version of the Kingdom Hearts box. The Kingdom Hearts page used to have it too, but they changed it back.
Also, last month Amazon.com accidentally released Greatest Hits packaging for Ratchet & Clank, Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus, ATV Offroad Fury 2, SOCOM: US Navy SEALs. I also found an obscure release list or two listing Sly Cooper for Greatest Hits release in September.
If anyone can find all of this info in one place, with actual release dates, it'd be great.
FWIW, I actually emailed the guys running this site before posting the story, to see if they could mirror it somewhere other than Geocities, and they said they'd signed up for some kind of bandwidth deal which meant the site had no bandwidth cap.
But they do pay extra for each GB over their monthly limit, so hopefully a subpage Slashdotting won't actually cost 'em much cash. Wacky.
Very interesting analysis indeed - but I believe that UbiSoft bought the rights to all the old Might and Magic games, even those that have already been developed, and which they can essentially now sell without sinking much/any new money into them. That's good for starters. And the Might and Magic name still has some prestige value, and if you figure that you can pay up to $5 million just for the right license, then paying $1 million to get your own intellectual property/license forever seems half-decent.
I think everyone got very good deals out of this, actually, considering the average game costs $3-5 million dollars, especially Microsoft, who got a respected and fully-developed baseball franchise for under $500,000 - crazy.
I think it depends how you spin it - sales are up from the previous quarter, but slightly down from the same quarter the previous year. That can be read as either bad, or good, depending on whether you're Reuters looking for a good angle or GameStop looking to hype financial results.
Actually, this post was from CowboyNeal, who is a sophisticated Pokemon fan, not a sophisticated Swingerz Golf fan like myself. There, that's much better, isn't it? :)
It's worth mentioning again - if you don't appreciate the amount of Games stories you're seeing on the main page when you log in, it's because you have 'collapse all sections' ticked in the 'Homepage' part of your preferences, and you're seeing all the stories posted on the Slashdot Games subpage on your mainpage. If you untick the 'collapse all sections' tickbox, or alternately, exclude games-related stories by topic or section, this should help your non-games-related Slashdot enjoyment a lot.
It's news, imho, because it's a newly posted article (as of last night), which, I believe, is the first time someone has taken screenshots from a prototype ROM to illustrate the changes originally discussed in the Wired article. I certainly haven't seen it before.
But we'd love people to submit as many games-specific posts as possible, yes. Please do!
This is probably worth mentioning again - if you're upset over the amount of games posts you see on the main page of Slashdot, then you're probably logged on and have ticked the 'collapse sections' box in your preferences. On average, we post less than one Games post a day on the main page - the vast majority of these posts are subsection-specific.
So you can either turn off 'collapse sections' in your preferences, and check out the other sections by using the sidebar, or just exclude posts by topic (games-related) or author in the same preferences. Hope this helps.
Busted. Comments duly noted, and I think I agree this story ended up over-editorializing to punch up a dry set of figures.
On another topic, what do people think the GameCube price difference means? Considering GameCube doesn't really have an official $19.99 greatest hits line (though it does have a Player's Choice line for $29.99), I thought that a little odd.
Looks like the Oscar bot is actually available to talk to via a chat interface as part of the TriadCity website here. You can now be impressed at his witticisms or just plain irked at him from the comfort of your web browser, yay.
I wasn't positive about this either, but according to this site, "While they are an independent company, HAL Laboratory can still be considered a Nintendo second-party developer due to their [close] relationship."
Actually, I talked to a reporter at CNN Money before posting this correction, because I tried mailing him to correct _his_ story, which said 80,000, and we looked at all the online sources and came to the conclusion that 80,000 seems to be correct.
To explain, that's how many GameCubes Nintendo sold to retailers in that period - not how many GameCubes were sold. So if Nintendo had already sold 1,000,000 GameCubes to retailers in the previous quarter, but the retailers only sold 500,000 of the previous quarter, and then this quarter, the retailers sold 580,000, then.. Nintendo would have only sold 80,000 consoles to retailers this quarter. Slightly odd, but conceivably correct.
Ah, I've got it now. What happened is that Warcry, for some not-so-smart reason, always use the same URL for the latest version of Warthog's column. So the previous Slashdot article now links there too, even though there are two different articles.
I've now fixed the URL in this story, so it at least points to the original review, which now has an different, archived URL on the Warcry site. How confusing.
In this case, if the site went down, it was probably a combined Penny Arcade (who featured the project this morning) and Slashdot Games effect, since this isn't actually a mainpage post. From my very un-scientific pokings, I've noticed that a Slashdot Games-only post can generate enough traffic to kill some smaller sites, but on its own, relatively rarely smashes better-hosted webpages.
I've seen the game widely reported as being out of Rockstar North (actual GTA developers), and at one point I found the game on a release list from two or three years back, when they were still called DMA Design. So personally, that's why it intrigues me. We'll see.
Actually, I admit I might have been annoyed if I'd paid full-price for it - I picked it up recently when it had gone down to $30, and that seemed fairer for a title that's pretty much an acquired taste :P
I actually have to stick up for DoA:Xtreme Beach Volleyball. Have any of you guys actually played it?
:) And Creepy Crawler, there's no nude cheat, but there is a nude hack which requires you to have modded your Xbox.
So sure, it's a little on the voyeuristic side. But I find the volleyball itself pretty addictive, the casino mini-games _really_ addictive, and the 'dating game' side of things (deciding which girls to give presents to, and which girls to court as your volleyball partner) kinda neat. Plus, collecting things is always a good gameplay spur, and there's a whole bunch of crazed things to collect, from, yes, swimsuits, all the way to prototype Xbox consoles, videos of previous Team Ninja titles, and more.
Oddly, when I showed it to a bunch of my friends recently, everyone was fascinated, gender notwithstanding. There's something about its extreme quirkiness that transcends crass.
But, uhm, YMMV. Definitely, YMMV.
We've actually covered the Intellivision TV Game, about a month back, and as mentioned in the article, covered the Atari 10-in-1 Game last year, but hadn't seen the lack of the Adventure easter-egg widely reported in the press, so thought it relevant - I wonder if they put a different message back in for later versions of the hardware, as opposed to 'TEXT', which definitely seems like an unfinished mistake?
This is actually a games subpager, not a front page story. If this were a front page story, even _I_ would be alarmed :)
Actually, turns out that there were only about 30,000 copies of Viewtiful Joe printed, according to some online reports - so the sell-out, although sounding impressive, isn't quite as impressive as it might sound. Still, if it keeps selling out..
Didn't put it in the main post cos it's a tad off-topic, but I just started watching Bandai's .hack//SIGN TV show on Cartoon Network, and there's some really interesting discussions of lawlessness in virtual worlds in that (seeing as it takes place in a MMORPG n' all.) It's an intriguing and thoughtprovoking show - do you go in a MMORPG to have fun however you want, even if it means being 'bad', or is imposing order necessary for the majority to have fun? That seemed to be one of the questions they tackled.
Thanks for pointing this out - I've amended the post a little to reflect this. I'm not entirely sure why Pokemon would be listed separately - is it counted as a separate company from Nintendo?