Who are you kidding? Largo will be too busy playing it to write, and we'll be stuck with Piro's "sad girls in snow" every two days... Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but...
Do stores enforce them? Not on yer nellie. It's my suspicion that if the retailers actually got off their collective lazy hineys and enforced these regulations they're meant to be doing, the OFLC wouldn't be in such a tizzy. Fine, great, sure. Working at a retailer (US, mind you-- same general problem everywhere, though), I bust my balls trying to stop people from choosing games that are completely inappropriate for their child (prime example being the woman who came in wanting to purchase Grand Theft Auto III for her nine-year-old son). I explain the ratings system, I tell the parents to read the back of the box, I even use the ratings as a gauge myself when checking if it's something I want to play (believe it or not, bloody is not always better).
And still the parents decide that they know better than to trust the judgement of the clerk in the store, and say "well, if that's what little billy bob wants, then I have to get it and not complain". It's not the retailer's faults, it's the parents'.
Oh, yes, that's what they all say, ooh, aah... But later there's the running... and the screaming... -and-
Must go faster. Stupid question, but if we (species-collective) can't even clone sheep right, what makes us think we can do this? What makes us think we should do this? I say we should stick with sheep. Sheep don't have huge fangs and if they die, then you've got mutton for dinner for the next three weeks. Bonuses all around. Just my opinion.
Of course, what does it REALLY matter if the parents refuse to read the labels, or worse become hostile to the clerks who try to alert the parent who is purchasing "Fear Effect 2" for her seven-year-old daughter?
Does that give them the right to be arrogant assholes? I've just been to 10 places looking for a 'Cube, and I was treated politely in 2 of 'em. A big 20%. Consider the fact that we hear the same question hundreds of times a day. Sometimes even from people who appear to read gaming websites (or, more often, profess to customers that (gaming site xyz) has a free walkthrough of the game that we have a guide for). Consider also the fact that many people take the phrase "the customer is always right" as license to verbally abuse store clerks.
I'm not saying that clerks have a right, per se, to treat customers sarcastically or with venom. I'm just saying that more often than not the clerks are merely responding in kind to the supplicant's less-than-friendly approach. We're human too, y'know.
As for the "sales rep" bit, most of the time Joe Average doesn't see the corporate memos that get passed around-- I know that at EB we only see a condensed daily news blurb that fails to cover even half of the big news in gaming-- it just deals with the immediate (what games are coming out when, when we can sell them, what items we have to push). Last i heard, Microplay wasn't exactly a "Mom 'n Pop" establishment either (though I could be wrong about that). Odds are good that a clerk has no reason to outright lie to you.
Odds are also good that I just fell hard for flamebait, but sue me. Just wanted to try to defend the good name of clerks everywhere.
Well, a year ago, many parents might have turned a blind eye to video game violence that their kids ingested, but now we have evil terrorists and we have to protect the children. Chalk that round up to Gamecube and their family oriented games.
Not true. Half of the parents I have to deal with in the store don't know a damn thing about the games they buy for their children (ex.: Buying Grand Theft Auto III for a seven-year-old, buying Fear Effect for a ten-year-old, etc.). Nobody knows about the ratings system (which is a good thing that it exists, but a bad thing that it's ignored). When I do tell parents about the ratings and recommend they re-think their purchase, I'm either thanked profusely (15% probability) or treated like dirt and verbally abused (85% probability).
But then again, that's neither here nor there, so I'll just say this-- GCN has Rogue Leader and Eternal Darkness slated for this holiday season, plus exclusive rights to Resident Evil (Biohazard), among others. So the arguments that Nintendo is solely a kids' system are at least weakened, if not moot.
Street Dating Explained From the Inside
on
Gamecube Hits US Early
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The word at EB is that if we break street date on ANY new product (not just GCN, but MGS2, X-Box, or the like) we (the company, and most likely the individual store) get fined $100K. The reason for this is that when you spend millions on an ad crusade fixated on one date and the (game/machine/widget) comes out early, the campaign is immediately wasted. (Nintendo/Microsoft/Konami) doesn't want their entire ad budget to go down the toilet all at once, so they impose these fines. It may be strongarm tactics, but hell, it's not like it's price fixing or something worse. I say if they want to build suspense-- and that's exactly the reason for street dates-- then let them.
Besides, it's not like there're really going to be any left for walk-in sales anyway...
THANK YOU! We're getting swamped here at EB with inane requests and frankly the ninetieth time we tell the *same* person "November 15th or 18th" is a bit excessive. If I could mod the parent up, I would, I would, a thousand times I would. I plea for patience. And cookies, or a soda. ^_^
Roommates are taping this and watching Survivor. Speak of the devil, CBS is really in a prime position, what with the hype about "something unheard of is happening tonight". Me, I'm stuck here for the duration......though I still need to see "24".
This is not to advocate big brotherism, but look at it from a different angle. I believe that national, standardized ID cards are a good idea for a different reason than simply national security. In my line of work, I often have to check drivers' licenses and other identification (I'm a store clerk, so I need to verify signatures on credit cards and for checks). Sometimes it's difficult to find the ID number on a card-- especially out-of-state cards-- so having the cards standardized would be a great help.
Also, it could cut down on the incidences of underage drinking and other vices. Many people I know get out-of-state fake IDs because they're often so blasted confusing that bouncers and clerks don't even bother to check them. Of course, on the other side of the coin, sometimes perfectly valid IDs are destroyed because they're foreign and assumed fake.
I'm not proposing anything like the "Identi-Eeze" card (from Douglas Adams' "Mostly Harmless"-- basically, it had everything and if stolen, could royally screw you over), but a standard photo ID card couldn't hurt things.
Re:So, how long until....
on
Portable N64
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· Score: 1
Probably as soon as we can all lift twenty pounds comfortably and hold it in front of our faces for five-ten hours at a time without our arms falling off.
I work at an Electronics Boutique in Erie, PA. Our XBox unit was the first in the area, and so far it hasn't given us any problems (beyond attracting people to our store solely for the reason of playing the XBox, driving our conversion rate through the basement) in the three weeks we've had it. HOWEVER, from handling it myself, I'd have to say that with all likelihood there's no way the machines in the stand-up kiosks could be beta or pre-release versions. I have not seen any crashes myself-- though I am interested in seeing it happen, at least once-- but that alone is not my only reasoning. The reason is that there are less than three weeks until the XBox launches in the US, and that it is FAR, FAR too late for MS to be revising the hardware setup now, if they want to meet their production goals for launch, not to mention the pre-orders that we have guaranteed our customers. Which brings me to a concept I'll tackle in a few moments...
Would be kinda neat to take apart a GBA and try to get it to run other things-- nothing in particular jumps to mind, but hey, at $100, why not buy extra parts and try building something like the old GB camera for it?
Or, y'know, you could blow the other $200 on games and take your mind off work once in a while.
Yes, of course. Sure, we can do that-- let's cram voice data over a standard 56K line! And maybe we can have the game download new maps for use at the same time! There won't be ANY degradation or lag then! Ooh, ooh-- why not just have them download the game entirely over that 56K line? After all, 56K should be enough for everyone. If it's as fast as the FCC will allow, then by God, it's good enough for Nintendo! That broadband thing is too expensive for kids to have anyway. So yeah, let's do that. Voice is the answer! HOORAY!
...disengaging sarcasm centers...
Actually, consider the fact that this is a third-party controller (hence the big ASCII right above the function keys), so the odds of Nintendo reneging on their "games-only" stance is pretty close to nil.
Oh, and yes, I know that Interact makes a third-party keyboard for the PS2, but the purpose of that beast is for FPS games like Half-Life and Deus Ex, which NEED more keys than the standard Dual Shock controller can handle.
I find it very amusing that the games he uses to demonstrate the hack's effectiveness are Mario Kart and Advance Wars, two of the most colorful, vibrant games available. I have NEVER had any difficulty seeing the screen even in dim light while playing AW. I would be a lot more impressed if he had demonstrated Castlevania: Circle of the Moon.
Or better yet, he should have just stopped tilting at windmills altogether. The dark color scheme problem is something that has to be worked around in software-- i.e. developers shouldn't choose varying shades of jet black on midnight blue as their color scheme. The GBA's difficult angles are just an added factor the developers and artists have to work around.
And another thing, as long as I'm up on this soapbox. I realize that the intent of the hack was to "prove displeasure in the GBA" and prove some conspiracy-theorist-wet-dream "monopoly" on the handheld market. But there is a very simple reason why Nintendo has the only portable video game system currently, and it is the same reason why Sony has the leading console (for now) and why (gasp!) Microsoft has the leading OS. It is the software support. The GB caught on because of Tetris; the GBC because of Pokemon, and the GBA because of all of its launch titles (except maybe Iridion). PS2 has the best games released for it and coming for it (MGS2, Klonoa 2, FF10, need I go on?). Windows systems are popular because quite literally that's what everything runs on nowadays (I know there are exceptions, but I'm thinking within the context of gaming; the really big-name games are all for Win98 etc). In all cases, the "monopoly" exists because nobody bought the competition.
If It Ain't Broke Don't Fix It
on
The New Zelda
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· Score: 1
I for one applaud Miyamoto-san's decision to move Zelda back to his original design. I did not like the N64 incarnations of Zelda as much as I enjoyed the Oracles games. This was because of one thing and one thing alone-- the 3-D Zelda games (Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, for all three of you who don't play console games) did not feel like Zelda, whereas the GBC games did. Ocarina of Time did not really have the "fooling around" aspect to it that made other, older Zeldas so much fun-- that is, there'd be a phase in which you'd just wander around the world, seeing what everything does when you whack it with the Hookshot, and so forth. Zelda has always been about freedom. Perhaps that's why I never actualy finished the original one (aside from the fact that I was seven years old at the time)-- I spent too much time wandering around finding new stuff, than actually trying to go through Level 9.
I think a lot of games could do with a good swift kick in the pants. Castlevania did, after all-- look at the revolting Castlevania 64 and then look at Circle of the Moon. Everyone can benefit by taking a couple of months to step back from "what people are doing now" and take a look at "what's worked in the past" and "what made [brand name] so popular to begin with". Innovation has its place, but if something doesn't work (realism in Zelda), it just plain doesn't work.
How exactly could GameSpy forget to put this game on the list? I mean, the Goonies II was obviously the game that inspired Konami to work on Castlevania: SOTN (yeah, so they did take a bit from Metroid, too, but that's not on the list either).
Come to think of it, I'm noticing a distinct anti-console slant. Consoles have had an extremely large role in promoting and boosting video gaming in the past ten years, IMO.
Actually, Pioneer has done an excellent job with Trigun, especially the DVD releases. Consider this-- Trigun on VHS is set up in the same way that Trigun on DVD is, in a "4 eps first and last, and 6 tapes of three eps"-- standard practice for Pioneer's TV series and a hell of a lot better than thirteen tapes of two eps (ex ADV's original release of Eva-- 13 $25 VHSes is a shitload more than 8 $30 VHSes for a complete series). Trigun's DVDs are comparable in price to VHS-- $25 for VHS, $28 for DVD-- but the bonus is a bit worth it, IMO. Considering that each disk includes a 15+ page "art book" (the special features) and some screen captures that the VHS does not. And that's not counting the fact that the DVD is both the subbed and dubbed versions or the better picture quality.
IIRC, the old Leonard Nimoy reruns are still shown once in a while on A&E. My parents were continually watching it.
I never much cared for the series-- the information always seemed way out of date, even considering the timeframe that it was produced in. Plus, the subject matter never appealed to me... but that's a different story.
Slashdot Mirror
Who are you kidding? Largo will be too busy playing it to write, and we'll be stuck with Piro's "sad girls in snow" every two days... Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but...
Hm. My birthday. Will this follow the trend of "even year, good present" or "even year, moldy socks"?
Do stores enforce them? Not on yer nellie. It's my suspicion that if the retailers actually got off their collective lazy hineys and enforced these regulations they're meant to be doing, the OFLC wouldn't be in such a tizzy.
Fine, great, sure. Working at a retailer (US, mind you-- same general problem everywhere, though), I bust my balls trying to stop people from choosing games that are completely inappropriate for their child (prime example being the woman who came in wanting to purchase Grand Theft Auto III for her nine-year-old son). I explain the ratings system, I tell the parents to read the back of the box, I even use the ratings as a gauge myself when checking if it's something I want to play (believe it or not, bloody is not always better).
And still the parents decide that they know better than to trust the judgement of the clerk in the store, and say "well, if that's what little billy bob wants, then I have to get it and not complain". It's not the retailer's faults, it's the parents'.
Oh, yes, that's what they all say, ooh, aah... But later there's the running... and the screaming...
-and-
Must go faster.
Stupid question, but if we (species-collective) can't even clone sheep right, what makes us think we can do this? What makes us think we should do this? I say we should stick with sheep. Sheep don't have huge fangs and if they die, then you've got mutton for dinner for the next three weeks. Bonuses all around. Just my opinion.
Exactly.
Of course, what does it REALLY matter if the parents refuse to read the labels, or worse become hostile to the clerks who try to alert the parent who is purchasing "Fear Effect 2" for her seven-year-old daughter?
Moot point, really.
Does that give them the right to be arrogant assholes? I've just been to 10 places looking for a 'Cube, and I was treated politely in 2 of 'em. A big 20%.
Consider the fact that we hear the same question hundreds of times a day. Sometimes even from people who appear to read gaming websites (or, more often, profess to customers that (gaming site xyz) has a free walkthrough of the game that we have a guide for). Consider also the fact that many people take the phrase "the customer is always right" as license to verbally abuse store clerks.
I'm not saying that clerks have a right, per se, to treat customers sarcastically or with venom. I'm just saying that more often than not the clerks are merely responding in kind to the supplicant's less-than-friendly approach. We're human too, y'know.
As for the "sales rep" bit, most of the time Joe Average doesn't see the corporate memos that get passed around-- I know that at EB we only see a condensed daily news blurb that fails to cover even half of the big news in gaming-- it just deals with the immediate (what games are coming out when, when we can sell them, what items we have to push). Last i heard, Microplay wasn't exactly a "Mom 'n Pop" establishment either (though I could be wrong about that). Odds are good that a clerk has no reason to outright lie to you.
Odds are also good that I just fell hard for flamebait, but sue me. Just wanted to try to defend the good name of clerks everywhere.
Well, a year ago, many parents might have turned a blind eye to video game violence that their kids ingested, but now we have evil terrorists and we have to protect the children. Chalk that round up to Gamecube and their family oriented games.
Not true. Half of the parents I have to deal with in the store don't know a damn thing about the games they buy for their children (ex.: Buying Grand Theft Auto III for a seven-year-old, buying Fear Effect for a ten-year-old, etc.). Nobody knows about the ratings system (which is a good thing that it exists, but a bad thing that it's ignored). When I do tell parents about the ratings and recommend they re-think their purchase, I'm either thanked profusely (15% probability) or treated like dirt and verbally abused (85% probability).
But then again, that's neither here nor there, so I'll just say this-- GCN has Rogue Leader and Eternal Darkness slated for this holiday season, plus exclusive rights to Resident Evil (Biohazard), among others. So the arguments that Nintendo is solely a kids' system are at least weakened, if not moot.
The word at EB is that if we break street date on ANY new product (not just GCN, but MGS2, X-Box, or the like) we (the company, and most likely the individual store) get fined $100K. The reason for this is that when you spend millions on an ad crusade fixated on one date and the (game/machine/widget) comes out early, the campaign is immediately wasted. (Nintendo/Microsoft/Konami) doesn't want their entire ad budget to go down the toilet all at once, so they impose these fines. It may be strongarm tactics, but hell, it's not like it's price fixing or something worse. I say if they want to build suspense-- and that's exactly the reason for street dates-- then let them.
Besides, it's not like there're really going to be any left for walk-in sales anyway...
THANK YOU! We're getting swamped here at EB with inane requests and frankly the ninetieth time we tell the *same* person "November 15th or 18th" is a bit excessive. If I could mod the parent up, I would, I would, a thousand times I would. I plea for patience. And cookies, or a soda. ^_^
4) Lose your driver's license, you can't drive until you get a new one; lose your national ID card, ???
Lose your national ID card, you can't exist until you get a new one.
And I thought having to pay $15 for a new student ID was rough...
Roommates are taping this and watching Survivor. Speak of the devil, CBS is really in a prime position, what with the hype about "something unheard of is happening tonight". Me, I'm stuck here for the duration... ...though I still need to see "24".
This is not to advocate big brotherism, but look at it from a different angle. I believe that national, standardized ID cards are a good idea for a different reason than simply national security. In my line of work, I often have to check drivers' licenses and other identification (I'm a store clerk, so I need to verify signatures on credit cards and for checks). Sometimes it's difficult to find the ID number on a card-- especially out-of-state cards-- so having the cards standardized would be a great help.
Also, it could cut down on the incidences of underage drinking and other vices. Many people I know get out-of-state fake IDs because they're often so blasted confusing that bouncers and clerks don't even bother to check them. Of course, on the other side of the coin, sometimes perfectly valid IDs are destroyed because they're foreign and assumed fake.
I'm not proposing anything like the "Identi-Eeze" card (from Douglas Adams' "Mostly Harmless"-- basically, it had everything and if stolen, could royally screw you over), but a standard photo ID card couldn't hurt things.
Probably as soon as we can all lift twenty pounds comfortably and hold it in front of our faces for five-ten hours at a time without our arms falling off.
I work at an Electronics Boutique in Erie, PA. Our XBox unit was the first in the area, and so far it hasn't given us any problems (beyond attracting people to our store solely for the reason of playing the XBox, driving our conversion rate through the basement) in the three weeks we've had it. HOWEVER, from handling it myself, I'd have to say that with all likelihood there's no way the machines in the stand-up kiosks could be beta or pre-release versions. I have not seen any crashes myself-- though I am interested in seeing it happen, at least once-- but that alone is not my only reasoning. The reason is that there are less than three weeks until the XBox launches in the US, and that it is FAR, FAR too late for MS to be revising the hardware setup now, if they want to meet their production goals for launch, not to mention the pre-orders that we have guaranteed our customers. Which brings me to a concept I'll tackle in a few moments...
Would be kinda neat to take apart a GBA and try to get it to run other things-- nothing in particular jumps to mind, but hey, at $100, why not buy extra parts and try building something like the old GB camera for it?
Or, y'know, you could blow the other $200 on games and take your mind off work once in a while.
Yes, of course. Sure, we can do that-- let's cram voice data over a standard 56K line! And maybe we can have the game download new maps for use at the same time! There won't be ANY degradation or lag then! Ooh, ooh-- why not just have them download the game entirely over that 56K line? After all, 56K should be enough for everyone. If it's as fast as the FCC will allow, then by God, it's good enough for Nintendo! That broadband thing is too expensive for kids to have anyway. So yeah, let's do that. Voice is the answer! HOORAY!
...disengaging sarcasm centers...
Actually, consider the fact that this is a third-party controller (hence the big ASCII right above the function keys), so the odds of Nintendo reneging on their "games-only" stance is pretty close to nil.
Oh, and yes, I know that Interact makes a third-party keyboard for the PS2, but the purpose of that beast is for FPS games like Half-Life and Deus Ex, which NEED more keys than the standard Dual Shock controller can handle.
To the best of your knowledge, did you ever find a bathroom on the set of TNG?
I find it very amusing that the games he uses to demonstrate the hack's effectiveness are Mario Kart and Advance Wars, two of the most colorful, vibrant games available. I have NEVER had any difficulty seeing the screen even in dim light while playing AW. I would be a lot more impressed if he had demonstrated Castlevania: Circle of the Moon.
Or better yet, he should have just stopped tilting at windmills altogether. The dark color scheme problem is something that has to be worked around in software-- i.e. developers shouldn't choose varying shades of jet black on midnight blue as their color scheme. The GBA's difficult angles are just an added factor the developers and artists have to work around.
And another thing, as long as I'm up on this soapbox. I realize that the intent of the hack was to "prove displeasure in the GBA" and prove some conspiracy-theorist-wet-dream "monopoly" on the handheld market. But there is a very simple reason why Nintendo has the only portable video game system currently, and it is the same reason why Sony has the leading console (for now) and why (gasp!) Microsoft has the leading OS. It is the software support. The GB caught on because of Tetris; the GBC because of Pokemon, and the GBA because of all of its launch titles (except maybe Iridion). PS2 has the best games released for it and coming for it (MGS2, Klonoa 2, FF10, need I go on?). Windows systems are popular because quite literally that's what everything runs on nowadays (I know there are exceptions, but I'm thinking within the context of gaming; the really big-name games are all for Win98 etc). In all cases, the "monopoly" exists because nobody bought the competition.
I for one applaud Miyamoto-san's decision to move Zelda back to his original design. I did not like the N64 incarnations of Zelda as much as I enjoyed the Oracles games. This was because of one thing and one thing alone-- the 3-D Zelda games (Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, for all three of you who don't play console games) did not feel like Zelda, whereas the GBC games did. Ocarina of Time did not really have the "fooling around" aspect to it that made other, older Zeldas so much fun-- that is, there'd be a phase in which you'd just wander around the world, seeing what everything does when you whack it with the Hookshot, and so forth. Zelda has always been about freedom. Perhaps that's why I never actualy finished the original one (aside from the fact that I was seven years old at the time)-- I spent too much time wandering around finding new stuff, than actually trying to go through Level 9.
I think a lot of games could do with a good swift kick in the pants. Castlevania did, after all-- look at the revolting Castlevania 64 and then look at Circle of the Moon. Everyone can benefit by taking a couple of months to step back from "what people are doing now" and take a look at "what's worked in the past" and "what made [brand name] so popular to begin with". Innovation has its place, but if something doesn't work (realism in Zelda), it just plain doesn't work.
I stand corrected. Super Metroid is on the list. Please don't flame me.
How exactly could GameSpy forget to put this game on the list? I mean, the Goonies II was obviously the game that inspired Konami to work on Castlevania: SOTN (yeah, so they did take a bit from Metroid, too, but that's not on the list either).
Come to think of it, I'm noticing a distinct anti-console slant. Consoles have had an extremely large role in promoting and boosting video gaming in the past ten years, IMO.
Dell abandons Linux as Compaq embraces it further. Once again, the order of the universe is restored.
Actually, Pioneer has done an excellent job with Trigun, especially the DVD releases. Consider this-- Trigun on VHS is set up in the same way that Trigun on DVD is, in a "4 eps first and last, and 6 tapes of three eps"-- standard practice for Pioneer's TV series and a hell of a lot better than thirteen tapes of two eps (ex ADV's original release of Eva-- 13 $25 VHSes is a shitload more than 8 $30 VHSes for a complete series). Trigun's DVDs are comparable in price to VHS-- $25 for VHS, $28 for DVD-- but the bonus is a bit worth it, IMO. Considering that each disk includes a 15+ page "art book" (the special features) and some screen captures that the VHS does not. And that's not counting the fact that the DVD is both the subbed and dubbed versions or the better picture quality.
I never much cared for the series-- the information always seemed way out of date, even considering the timeframe that it was produced in. Plus, the subject matter never appealed to me... but that's a different story.