There were innumerable ways to get all kinds of wierdness to happen in the old NES and SNES games. I never owned a Genesis, but I can't imagine there aren't tons of them.
I knew several people who used to glitch hunt back in the day. It was a way to hack the games without really being able to hack them per se. Figuring out all the flaws. A quick search for such gave me http://kontek.net/davidwonn/nes.html which is a glitch listing site for NES games, and I'm sure there are far more like it.
The difference between the glitches of old and the bugs of today is that for the most part, the old time glitches didn't interrupt normal gameplay. If you never tried whatever the particular arcane button combination was at the exact time you needed to do it, you never saw it. Sometimes you wanted to, like the invincibility glitch in Mega Man 3, because it made the game easier or made everything all wierd colors or something. These days bugs tend to make games almost impossible to play, or damage your computer. See Deus Ex 2 for Xbox (would BSOD the console, always amusing) and Pool of Radiance 2 for PC (the infamous hard drive erasing bug).
Of course, there were plenty of shoddily designed games back in those days where the bugs were so awful that it made the games near unplayable, but they generally game from fly by night operators in the first place. Look around the old NES game reviews in GameFAQs and you'll see a ton of prime offenders.
Why on earth does an e-mail client need podcasting?
Of all the useless features... That dev time could've been used to do something useful, like getting the calendaring addon/app working well instead of just functioning.
Color me unimpressed. The Mozilla Foundation needs to stop playing buzzword bingo before they go overboard.
I didn't like Guild Wars enough to buy it in the first place (friends bought it, I didn't steal it). I can't think of a single reason why I'd want to pay a monthly fee for basically the exact same thing.
No, the real question is, is the 800g in WoW gold that I give to Joe for his Krol Blade taxable. IE, does Joe have to pay US dollars in tax for what is arguably mere barter that happens to be within a game.
I got a DS with Christmas money and 6 games (one of them being the Mario Kart that came with the system). Meteos, Advance Wars: DS, Puyo Pop, Bomberman, and Zookeeper. They're so addictive I've been playing less and less World of Warcraft and more of the DS games. Nintendo very much has a winner on their hands with this. I can't wait for the Revolution to come out with all kind of crazy neat things to do with the DS as a controller.
Any show worth watching will eventually come out on DVD, and I can get it then. Mythbusters is a fun, educational program, but $50/month to Comcast is WAY more than it's worth. At least my Internet provider doesn't force ads on me in addition to their monthly bill.
His idea of MS selling their units through eBay themselves is interesting, but that would only piss off retailers that MS relies upon.
There's no real way to prove that Microsoft isn't selling the units on eBay, unless Gamestop/EB or Best Buy tries to follow up on where each individual Xbox360 ebayer got their product. Something they aren't likely to waste time bothering with.
The question remains though, who determines who is an ISP?
Web hosting is a service that runs on the internet. It doesn't take much for a lawyer to argue that the definition should be expanded to anyone that provides any kind of service online, not just the providers of network connections.
Instead of giving up, techies take threats as a challenge or motivation to dive further and further away from public vision.
The thing is, that's exactly what the RIAA, MPAA, and sundry want.
They are not so stupid to think that they can stop all copyright infringement. What they want to do is force it out of the light, so you have to take more effort than they believe it is worth to steal it than it would take to just pay them for it in the manner they want you to.
Moving file-sharing et al into the underground, where you need the secret passwords and handshakes is just fine by the people running the show. Joe Consumer doesn't know about the secret networks, and if the people running them are smart, they're not going to invite Joe Consumer, because more than likely, he'll blab about his super special friends and their formerly secret network won't be so secret anymore. These days any idiot can download Limewire or whatever and get whatever file they damn well please. Make it all underground, and Joe Consumer has to go to the copyright cartels for whatever because he ain't getting into the super secret snobby techie club.
I stopped watching television years ago and I'm much happier for it. The only reason I have one around is to watch DVDs and for my game systems. I don't download TV programs because nothing on television is worth the time it takes to watch it, the bandwidth I would need to allocate to downloading and uploading to other torrenters, or even the infinitesimal chance that I'll get served a lawsuit over it.
If you all just stopped paying an exorbinant amount of money, monthly, to people that want to do you harm, maybe things would change.
Thus the question over DRM remains: should we be policed by our own property?
The question really is, will you knowingly buy something that polices you? If you do, you have zero sympathy from me. Hidden DRM, you have sympathy. Refusing to succumb to consumerism and just not buying something which acts in a way you don't like gets you far more sympathy.
People need to take a stand and just ignore the "crap" that they complain is being foisted upon them. For exactly what reason do you have a DVD player if "everything Hollywood produces today is crap". Why do you own a CD player if "everything the RIAA produces is crap"? Why waste bandwidth stealing it? I don't have cable television because I fervently believe that while there is worthwhile programming, the vast majority of it is stinking horse shit, and I don't feel like paying Comcast $50/month for the priviledge of my home being used as a septic tank for them, the TV production companies, and their advertisers. Yeah, I don't see a lot of stuff, but frankly I don't think I'm missing anything. If someone offered me a 100% guaranteed way to pirate full fledged DirectTV without the possibility of getting caught, I'd turn it down. If these new DVD replacement technologies have restrictions on them I can't live with, you can be damn sure I'm not going to buy them, no matter how popular they end up being.
Maybe I'm just getting old and this is the beginning of the "all new technology from this point on is against nature" phase of life Douglas Adams talked about. Maybe I don't really care.
The entire article is in dire need of an editor. "Nicely written" indeed...for an 15 year old. Myriad spelling mistakes any spellchecker worth a damn should've caught, run on sentences, a writer far too obsessed with his thesaurus, and writing that is obviously intended to sound "important" but ends up sounding "pretentious."
My opinion? The Internet is so big, so anonymous, so unstoppable... to try to stop it is just ignorant.
Your opinion seems to be based upon as much ignorance. The Internet is very much stoppable. Governments could very easily make Internet access illegal merely by passing laws. Data lines can be cut with a nice heavy pair of scissors. Governments are VERY powerful. People seem to forget this in this day and age, because the US government dances to a corporate tune these days. While outlawing the Internet might be a stupid move in the long run, it is VERY easy for any government to do it, and enforcing it isn't that difficult. At worst it's a whack-a-mole game. Daring a government to do something about what you're doing is a good way to make sure that they do, and double sure you're not going to like what they do.
start selling your product with at least 20th century means
I wasn't aware that the Compact Disc was invented in the 19th century. Or the 8 track, magnetic audio tape, or vinyl records. I haven't seen any wax cylinders or aluminum foil drums on sale in the record stores lately. This "iTunes Music Store" and "Napster" stuff must just be figments of my imagination, too.
...what idiot venture capital firm gave him the money to do it, so I can tell everyone I know not to invest in the startups they invest in. Obviously these people are seriously disconnected from reality.
Certainly, the kind of hassles which various malware cause all over the place don't seem to be convincing anyone that security is an important thing that they need t obe aware of.
I can't count the number of people who've let their computers go to shit, paid me several hundred dollars to get those computers back to a usable state, and actively ignore what I've told them they need to do to keep their computers from getting messed up. It's too hard to remember to use Firefox, or to remember to run AdAware, or to remember to keep paying the subscription on their virus scanner, or move to a safer operating system (either MacOS or Linux would do) or whatever.
Maybe if these worms, viruses, etc, started making hardware unusable people would take this shit a bit more seriously. Maybe I don't care in the end, because their ignorance is to my profit, just like their ignorance is to Symantec's. Or rather, their general ignorance, punctuated with health doses of fear, so they'll run out and obtain my services, or buy Symantec's crappy software.
If you mean to say that the bestseller lists are populated by easier games than there used to be, I completely agree. As I said before, people don't like to lose, so they play games they don't lose at as much. More gamers mean more people buying the easier games.
That doesn't mean hard games have gone the way of the dodo. If hard games are your cup of tea, there are plenty to choose from.
Children should not be able to buy Grand Theft Auto/Manhunt/Playboy Mansion games without an adult's obvious express permission. A lot of people whine about how "the parents need to take responsiblity for what their kids do" and I completely agree. With the parents of today, who on the whole don't want to be bothered by what their kids are doing, these laws are the only real way of forcing these shithead parents into minding what the hell their kids are doing.
People claiming the slippery slope here, or censorship either don't have a grasp on reality, or are under 17 and whose parents would now be forced to parent. Or parents that don't want to do anything, and want the "nanny state" to allow them to let their kids run wild so someone else can deal with their unwanted progeny.
Examples: * Shinobi for PS2 is one of the hardest games I've ever played. Definite flashbacks of Ninja Gaiden and other such controller smashing games. * Painkiller for PC has easy settings, but a siginificant portion of the levels aren't available to you unless you play on the hardest (intitially available) difficulty level. Anyone who claims they beat that game without dying many many many times is lying. * The many Mega Man sequels are easily among the hardest games I've ever played, including the GBA and PS2 sequels. They tend to get bad reviews because of how difficult they are. * F-Zero GX is extremely difficult on the hard difficulty settings. Many many runs through required before you beat anything significant. * Ikaruga is just nuts. Any shooter that hard where you get brownie points for never firing a single shot the entire game just goes above and beyond.
I could go further, but I don't have the time to do an exhaustive treatise on Difficult Video Games of Today. My personal opinion is that because of the skyrocketing volume of games, the percentage of easier games has gotten much greater, mostly because normal human beings don't enjoy the frustration and insane difficulty. They want to pick up a game, mess around, have some fun and win (which fewer and fewer people have the experience of in their real lives) and get on with the drudgery of keeping things held together.
As long as I can buy a portable DVD player, that happens to come with a larger and better quality screen, for around the same as a PSP, UMD doesn't mean crap.
I can play those DVDs on my computers or PS2. I can't do anything with the UMDs if my PSP is dead.
If they had gotten their way, EULAs would mean absolutely squat. The GPL is enforceable as written because it rests on the same legal structure that Microsoft's EULA does.
That's not true. You are as blinded by the flashy graphics as those who think anything that looks nifty is a good game. You just think anything that looks nifty is a bad game. It's not true.
Whether it's worth spending the time to convince you that you're wrong, I have serious doubts over.
"It used to be that anything that made it to cart was considered decent quality, but that's not the case any more."
This, sir, is either a bald faced lie, or a sign that you need to take the blinders off about the "good old days".
Not even bothering to discuss the mere legion of asstastic movie, cartoon, and comic book themed games that were released on the N64 and Genesis alone, given time this board could be flooded with crap games from the classic arcade years until the end of the 16 bit era.
Give me some time and I can compile a list of many more craptascular relics from that bygone age of "innovation" that we'd be far better not having haunting us.
Yeah, they import the game from America. What the article was talking about is that these are 1.5million new subscribers using the new Chinese servers. Not people from overseas using the American game client.
Some people still do. I still don't have cable TV. My father called up the cable company once and started paying for it, then kept forgetting to pay the bill. Every 6 months or so, when I finally got around to using the TV for something other than DVDs and video games, I'd be greeted with a blank back screen, and I'd call him up and remind him to pay the bill if he really wanted me to have it. Eventually he forgot so long (and I stopped bothering to tell him) that the cable company came and retrieved their equipment on their own, and I told my dad not to start it up again.
Avoiding ads on TV is something I'd pay for. No way in hell am _I_ going to pay to get them. If someone else wants to pay, whatever floats their boat.
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There were innumerable ways to get all kinds of wierdness to happen in the old NES and SNES games. I never owned a Genesis, but I can't imagine there aren't tons of them.
I knew several people who used to glitch hunt back in the day. It was a way to hack the games without really being able to hack them per se. Figuring out all the flaws. A quick search for such gave me http://kontek.net/davidwonn/nes.html which is a glitch listing site for NES games, and I'm sure there are far more like it.
The difference between the glitches of old and the bugs of today is that for the most part, the old time glitches didn't interrupt normal gameplay. If you never tried whatever the particular arcane button combination was at the exact time you needed to do it, you never saw it. Sometimes you wanted to, like the invincibility glitch in Mega Man 3, because it made the game easier or made everything all wierd colors or something. These days bugs tend to make games almost impossible to play, or damage your computer. See Deus Ex 2 for Xbox (would BSOD the console, always amusing) and Pool of Radiance 2 for PC (the infamous hard drive erasing bug).
Of course, there were plenty of shoddily designed games back in those days where the bugs were so awful that it made the games near unplayable, but they generally game from fly by night operators in the first place. Look around the old NES game reviews in GameFAQs and you'll see a ton of prime offenders.
Why on earth does an e-mail client need podcasting?
Of all the useless features... That dev time could've been used to do something useful, like getting the calendaring addon/app working well instead of just functioning.
Color me unimpressed. The Mozilla Foundation needs to stop playing buzzword bingo before they go overboard.
I didn't like Guild Wars enough to buy it in the first place (friends bought it, I didn't steal it). I can't think of a single reason why I'd want to pay a monthly fee for basically the exact same thing.
No, the real question is, is the 800g in WoW gold that I give to Joe for his Krol Blade taxable. IE, does Joe have to pay US dollars in tax for what is arguably mere barter that happens to be within a game.
I got a DS with Christmas money and 6 games (one of them being the Mario Kart that came with the system). Meteos, Advance Wars: DS, Puyo Pop, Bomberman, and Zookeeper. They're so addictive I've been playing less and less World of Warcraft and more of the DS games. Nintendo very much has a winner on their hands with this. I can't wait for the Revolution to come out with all kind of crazy neat things to do with the DS as a controller.
There was quality TV in the first place?
Any show worth watching will eventually come out on DVD, and I can get it then. Mythbusters is a fun, educational program, but $50/month to Comcast is WAY more than it's worth. At least my Internet provider doesn't force ads on me in addition to their monthly bill.
His idea of MS selling their units through eBay themselves is interesting, but that would only piss off retailers that MS relies upon.
There's no real way to prove that Microsoft isn't selling the units on eBay, unless Gamestop/EB or Best Buy tries to follow up on where each individual Xbox360 ebayer got their product. Something they aren't likely to waste time bothering with.
The question remains though, who determines who is an ISP?
Web hosting is a service that runs on the internet. It doesn't take much for a lawyer to argue that the definition should be expanded to anyone that provides any kind of service online, not just the providers of network connections.
Technically all of the EV games have been ported to PC, as there are plugins for EV Nova that basically turn the whole game into EV or EV Override.
Instead of giving up, techies take threats as a challenge or motivation to dive further and further away from public vision.
The thing is, that's exactly what the RIAA, MPAA, and sundry want.
They are not so stupid to think that they can stop all copyright infringement. What they want to do is force it out of the light, so you have to take more effort than they believe it is worth to steal it than it would take to just pay them for it in the manner they want you to.
Moving file-sharing et al into the underground, where you need the secret passwords and handshakes is just fine by the people running the show. Joe Consumer doesn't know about the secret networks, and if the people running them are smart, they're not going to invite Joe Consumer, because more than likely, he'll blab about his super special friends and their formerly secret network won't be so secret anymore. These days any idiot can download Limewire or whatever and get whatever file they damn well please. Make it all underground, and Joe Consumer has to go to the copyright cartels for whatever because he ain't getting into the super secret snobby techie club.
I stopped watching television years ago and I'm much happier for it. The only reason I have one around is to watch DVDs and for my game systems. I don't download TV programs because nothing on television is worth the time it takes to watch it, the bandwidth I would need to allocate to downloading and uploading to other torrenters, or even the infinitesimal chance that I'll get served a lawsuit over it.
If you all just stopped paying an exorbinant amount of money, monthly, to people that want to do you harm, maybe things would change.
Thus the question over DRM remains: should we be policed by our own property?
The question really is, will you knowingly buy something that polices you? If you do, you have zero sympathy from me. Hidden DRM, you have sympathy. Refusing to succumb to consumerism and just not buying something which acts in a way you don't like gets you far more sympathy.
People need to take a stand and just ignore the "crap" that they complain is being foisted upon them. For exactly what reason do you have a DVD player if "everything Hollywood produces today is crap". Why do you own a CD player if "everything the RIAA produces is crap"? Why waste bandwidth stealing it? I don't have cable television because I fervently believe that while there is worthwhile programming, the vast majority of it is stinking horse shit, and I don't feel like paying Comcast $50/month for the priviledge of my home being used as a septic tank for them, the TV production companies, and their advertisers. Yeah, I don't see a lot of stuff, but frankly I don't think I'm missing anything. If someone offered me a 100% guaranteed way to pirate full fledged DirectTV without the possibility of getting caught, I'd turn it down. If these new DVD replacement technologies have restrictions on them I can't live with, you can be damn sure I'm not going to buy them, no matter how popular they end up being.
Maybe I'm just getting old and this is the beginning of the "all new technology from this point on is against nature" phase of life Douglas Adams talked about. Maybe I don't really care.
The entire article is in dire need of an editor. "Nicely written" indeed...for an 15 year old. Myriad spelling mistakes any spellchecker worth a damn should've caught, run on sentences, a writer far too obsessed with his thesaurus, and writing that is obviously intended to sound "important" but ends up sounding "pretentious."
My opinion? The Internet is so big, so anonymous, so unstoppable... to try to stop it is just ignorant.
Your opinion seems to be based upon as much ignorance. The Internet is very much stoppable. Governments could very easily make Internet access illegal merely by passing laws. Data lines can be cut with a nice heavy pair of scissors. Governments are VERY powerful. People seem to forget this in this day and age, because the US government dances to a corporate tune these days. While outlawing the Internet might be a stupid move in the long run, it is VERY easy for any government to do it, and enforcing it isn't that difficult. At worst it's a whack-a-mole game. Daring a government to do something about what you're doing is a good way to make sure that they do, and double sure you're not going to like what they do.
start selling your product with at least 20th century means
I wasn't aware that the Compact Disc was invented in the 19th century. Or the 8 track, magnetic audio tape, or vinyl records. I haven't seen any wax cylinders or aluminum foil drums on sale in the record stores lately. This "iTunes Music Store" and "Napster" stuff must just be figments of my imagination, too.
...what idiot venture capital firm gave him the money to do it, so I can tell everyone I know not to invest in the startups they invest in. Obviously these people are seriously disconnected from reality.
Certainly, the kind of hassles which various malware cause all over the place don't seem to be convincing anyone that security is an important thing that they need t obe aware of.
I can't count the number of people who've let their computers go to shit, paid me several hundred dollars to get those computers back to a usable state, and actively ignore what I've told them they need to do to keep their computers from getting messed up. It's too hard to remember to use Firefox, or to remember to run AdAware, or to remember to keep paying the subscription on their virus scanner, or move to a safer operating system (either MacOS or Linux would do) or whatever.
Maybe if these worms, viruses, etc, started making hardware unusable people would take this shit a bit more seriously. Maybe I don't care in the end, because their ignorance is to my profit, just like their ignorance is to Symantec's. Or rather, their general ignorance, punctuated with health doses of fear, so they'll run out and obtain my services, or buy Symantec's crappy software.
If you mean to say that the bestseller lists are populated by easier games than there used to be, I completely agree. As I said before, people don't like to lose, so they play games they don't lose at as much. More gamers mean more people buying the easier games.
That doesn't mean hard games have gone the way of the dodo. If hard games are your cup of tea, there are plenty to choose from.
People claiming the slippery slope here, or censorship either don't have a grasp on reality, or are under 17 and whose parents would now be forced to parent. Or parents that don't want to do anything, and want the "nanny state" to allow them to let their kids run wild so someone else can deal with their unwanted progeny.
Examples:
* Shinobi for PS2 is one of the hardest games I've ever played. Definite flashbacks of Ninja Gaiden and other such controller smashing games.
* Painkiller for PC has easy settings, but a siginificant portion of the levels aren't available to you unless you play on the hardest (intitially available) difficulty level. Anyone who claims they beat that game without dying many many many times is lying.
* The many Mega Man sequels are easily among the hardest games I've ever played, including the GBA and PS2 sequels. They tend to get bad reviews because of how difficult they are.
* F-Zero GX is extremely difficult on the hard difficulty settings. Many many runs through required before you beat anything significant.
* Ikaruga is just nuts. Any shooter that hard where you get brownie points for never firing a single shot the entire game just goes above and beyond.
I could go further, but I don't have the time to do an exhaustive treatise on Difficult Video Games of Today. My personal opinion is that because of the skyrocketing volume of games, the percentage of easier games has gotten much greater, mostly because normal human beings don't enjoy the frustration and insane difficulty. They want to pick up a game, mess around, have some fun and win (which fewer and fewer people have the experience of in their real lives) and get on with the drudgery of keeping things held together.
As long as I can buy a portable DVD player, that happens to come with a larger and better quality screen, for around the same as a PSP, UMD doesn't mean crap.
I can play those DVDs on my computers or PS2. I can't do anything with the UMDs if my PSP is dead.
If they had gotten their way, EULAs would mean absolutely squat. The GPL is enforceable as written because it rests on the same legal structure that Microsoft's EULA does.
That's not true. You are as blinded by the flashy graphics as those who think anything that looks nifty is a good game. You just think anything that looks nifty is a bad game. It's not true.
Whether it's worth spending the time to convince you that you're wrong, I have serious doubts over.
"It used to be that anything that made it to cart was considered decent quality, but that's not the case any more."
This, sir, is either a bald faced lie, or a sign that you need to take the blinders off about the "good old days".
Not even bothering to discuss the mere legion of asstastic movie, cartoon, and comic book themed games that were released on the N64 and Genesis alone, given time this board could be flooded with crap games from the classic arcade years until the end of the 16 bit era.
The reviews at the Somethingawful.com ROM Pit are just the start.
Give me some time and I can compile a list of many more craptascular relics from that bygone age of "innovation" that we'd be far better not having haunting us.
Yeah, they import the game from America. What the article was talking about is that these are 1.5million new subscribers using the new Chinese servers. Not people from overseas using the American game client.
Some people still do. I still don't have cable TV. My father called up the cable company once and started paying for it, then kept forgetting to pay the bill. Every 6 months or so, when I finally got around to using the TV for something other than DVDs and video games, I'd be greeted with a blank back screen, and I'd call him up and remind him to pay the bill if he really wanted me to have it. Eventually he forgot so long (and I stopped bothering to tell him) that the cable company came and retrieved their equipment on their own, and I told my dad not to start it up again.
Avoiding ads on TV is something I'd pay for. No way in hell am _I_ going to pay to get them. If someone else wants to pay, whatever floats their boat.