Google.... My one true enemy... You finally reveal yourself.
PREPARE TO DIE, AS I REPORT YOU TO THE FBI FOR BLOCKING MY HOMEPAGE!
Yes, using caps is a lot like yelling. That's the point. I'm not sure at what point yelling became a problem. People yell all the time.
Anthropologists think that yelling was created in ancient Sumeria in early 5000bc. It turned out to be of great use to the Sumerians, who had until then spoken in polite tones. Now they could convey messages across crowded rooms, or great distances, without having to resort to smoke signals, which really irritated people in the immediate vicinity. Ironically, this would be revisited millenia later when the cell phone would allow a similar use of technology to circumvent yelling as a method of long distance communication.
It seems to me that battlestar galactica is a completely moot point: You're talking SPACE SHIPS. 100% technology right there. The show could argue against homogenous technology, but it can't argue against technology by itself, because we're talking about freakin' space ships!
Similarly, without guns or planes or missles or bombs, you can't take on a battleship, no matter HOW many motivated sailors you have.
Besides which, who says you can crack an isolated control computer remotely? If we're talking about a PLC stuck somewhere in the guts of a ship, then to crack it you'd actually have to be on the ship, and at that point it doesn't matter if you're using PLCs or control rooms full of busy people -- both can be easily taken out. PCs can be hacked, to be sure, but if that PC doesn't have any access to the PLC other than "You can read these memory addresses, and you can write to these memory addresses, but the PLC won't let you break anything because you're an operator and most automation engineers hold operators in contempt", then suddenly your automation isn't really a threat.
Instead, you see an arguement against allowing PCs to control battleships, and other than the IT folks, most rational people would agree that using a known insecure platform even to interface a critical control system is literal suicide.
I can imagine some potty mouthed naval Automation Engineer getting frustrated that the operator interface PCs crashed yet again and demanding someone get him a 24V supply and a laptop so he can rig up a "FUCKING fire button".:P
Unless you believe that people will attack a battleship with a bayonet, your point seems rather moot -- in modern warfare, humans *MUST* rely on their technology, because the targets are virtually indestructable to anything else.
Moving on, it's depressing that this was posted here. What started as a discussion among professionals about the state of their company has started to devolve into a disgusting ms bashing party.
Seeing the real thoughts and worries and pride of MS employees is infinitely more interesting than seeing some 12 year old blast Microsoft.
It's interesting to watch the comments as they unfold in the blog entry. Some of them are very frantic. "The company is going down! Abort! Abort! Abandon ship now!!" -- This from a company which has no real competition.
To be honest, I don't see what they're so upset about. It's done when it's done.
Doublespace/Drvspace is a wonderful show of Microsoft at work. As I recall, they were sued successfully by Stacker for more or less ripping off their product.
Could it be that your rational mind has constructed an irrational reason trying to explain the behaviour of your irrational mind?
You conceed on all counts that the game fell flat on it's face. Even the vaunted "Gameplay" that everyone in this thread seems to put on a pedestal is obviously lacking. There is no good reason to believe that those games were better. Yet, you end up giving it points for "imagination".
This reeks of whimsical nostolgia.
When I was a kid, Monopoly seemed like the most incredibly interesting and fun game ever. It was great -- terribly complex for a 10 or 12 year old, almost impossible to get through and entire game because it was so drawn out and complex, and the strategy seemed to surpass anything I'd seen before! However, playing it today, it seems like a terribly fatalistic game, with a simplistic joke of an economic model, where the players all fly towards the inevitable end-game.
It wasn't the game that had changed. It was myself. I'm willing to bet that if you had some of the cooler games today back when you were a kid, they'd put adventure to shame: Simple web slinging was the coolest thing in the early spider-man games. Imagine if you gave the youthful version of yourself Half-life 2 and the gravity gun? Hours of giddy fun and childish experiments.
You're ignoring an important point: That's a gameplay element chosen intentionally.
The fact of the matter is, most people who play these games aren't very good, so to ensure that people will keep playing for more than a game or two, it's neccessary to make scoring easier. It's not realistic, mind you, but for most people, it's more fun to skate around with Wayne Gretzky scoring goals than to skate around with Wayne Gretsky being shown all the reasons why Wayne is the great one and the player is just some fat white collar bum playing video games on his 12 inch TV.
Actually, most game developers aren't that cruel anymore.
Forcing a player to learn a fictional language is part of the family of the lowest forms of length increasing gimmick.
Reminds me of playing Star Trek: 25th anniversary(I think it was...), and having some ridiculous puzzle. Even after I looked up the answer to the puzzle, it was like "Of course! The talderians have three fingers, so they'd be using base three! and stigmata is their favourite national holiday, so the first number must be 2! And cacodemons don't even exist as a literary reference in this universe, so the second number is 6!" -- a complete non-sequitor to the rest of the game at that point.
Actually, the simple solution is far simpler: Don't render polygons that are between the main character and the players line of sight. It's simple to implement, elegant, and allows the third person view to work without ever having to pull around because Raziel or Lara backed up against a wall.
Speaking of which, Defiance tried innovating with the camera. If the next game has the same "innovation", I'm going to have to destroy everyone the main designer has ever loved.
Final Fantasy 7 is just one game though. I loved Daggerfall because it plopped you in a world with no real guidance, just "Ok, here's a world. Go do stuff". Morrowind picked up on this and delivered an entire island, while utilizing modern technology and game design to make the world INTERESTING, so the terrain they had created wouldn't be ignored as it was in Daggerfall. Oblivion later this month may kill me.:P
I've played literally thousands of games for most of the older consoles.
I hate to break this news to you, but the vast, vast, vast majority of games for Atari, NES, and SNES were just clones. For every "Metal Warriors" or "Super Mario Brothers", there are 10, or even 100 "Generic sidescroller space shooter or platform game X!!!". Making matters worse, a LOT of those clones were simply horrible and unplayable.
As much as I hate to admit it, the massive bar for entry today has resulted in titles of ridiculously good design, ridiculously massive scope, and ridiculously complete immersion.
The sad part is that Star Trek engineers have obviously never heard of fail safe engineering, so running the warp drive through the same computer they use to play "Doom 274: The revenge of the return of the wrath of Cyberdemon" isn't out of the realm of possibility.
Those who would disagree with me should remember all the times a failure made a process do something dangerous.:P
The last thing you want to do for a well from is have it be something without an electrical pump... and with a tiny hose, Hardware is a small part of the cost of providing computing capabilities! The big costs come from bottling it and shipping it around the world for niche markets, such as Japanese bottled water sold as a luxury item in north america. If you are going to go have people drink the water, get a bottle of aquafina and have someone they can order more from, geez, get a decent drinking water source where you can actually turn on your taps and you're not sitting there cranking the thing while you're trying drink.
In other words, in this story, Bill Gates is a Marie Antoinette impersonator, telling the people who no longer have any flour for bread to eat cake, or the people living in the middle of nowhere to use some batteries and get a broadband connection.
You're ignoring my point: Innovation isn't just doing random stuff! Innovation COMES from somewhere, and demanding that games be "innovative" is to demand that games sacrifice themselves on the altar of innovation by ignoring whether such games are actually fun -- or indeed, made any more fun, by the very innovations that these people are spending months of their lives implementing.
The anti-videogame crowd are the same idiots who think that colleges are nothing but drunken orgies -- idiots in a moral panic with no facts to speak of.
Sadly, people who actually want to graduate with a useful degree can't got to the bisexual orgie beer binges. Similarly, indie games aren't made by raving mad corporations intent on making kids into killing machines, but by
Their attitude towards anyone who isn't themselves is disgusting and assumes the worst at every possible turn. Their behaviour and attitude does not justify lowering ourselves to respond to them.
This sounds good on the surface, but the truth of the matter is that the best kind of innovation takes something old and tired and breathes new life into it. For example, Half life was terribly innovative because of it's implementation of the plot, but it was still just a first person shooter.
The major problem with gaming intellectuals who demand innovation in all arenas is that true innovation doesn't come from a vacuum; it arrives either because the ingredients for the idea have accumulated, as was the case in quakes mlook, because hardware has finally come to the point that the innovation can be implemented properly, as was the case when Wolfenstein 3d introduced the viable first person shooter, or because someone with appropriate training has taken a non-gaming discipline and applied it to a gaming environment, as was the case when first person tactical military simulation became a viable genre.
Demanding innovation point-blank is a recipe for failure, as a thousand "Innovative" yet unplayable games will attest to.
Slashdot Mirror
Erm....
Isn't X11 older than Windows?
The destruction of man-years of volunteer effort on the whim of single interest DOES seem like that to me.
Freedom, after all, is freedom.
Google.... My one true enemy... You finally reveal yourself.
PREPARE TO DIE, AS I REPORT YOU TO THE FBI FOR BLOCKING MY HOMEPAGE!
Yes, using caps is a lot like yelling. That's the point. I'm not sure at what point yelling became a problem. People yell all the time.
Anthropologists think that yelling was created in ancient Sumeria in early 5000bc. It turned out to be of great use to the Sumerians, who had until then spoken in polite tones. Now they could convey messages across crowded rooms, or great distances, without having to resort to smoke signals, which really irritated people in the immediate vicinity. Ironically, this would be revisited millenia later when the cell phone would allow a similar use of technology to circumvent yelling as a method of long distance communication.
It seems to me that battlestar galactica is a completely moot point: You're talking SPACE SHIPS. 100% technology right there. The show could argue against homogenous technology, but it can't argue against technology by itself, because we're talking about freakin' space ships!
Similarly, without guns or planes or missles or bombs, you can't take on a battleship, no matter HOW many motivated sailors you have.
Besides which, who says you can crack an isolated control computer remotely? If we're talking about a PLC stuck somewhere in the guts of a ship, then to crack it you'd actually have to be on the ship, and at that point it doesn't matter if you're using PLCs or control rooms full of busy people -- both can be easily taken out. PCs can be hacked, to be sure, but if that PC doesn't have any access to the PLC other than "You can read these memory addresses, and you can write to these memory addresses, but the PLC won't let you break anything because you're an operator and most automation engineers hold operators in contempt", then suddenly your automation isn't really a threat.
Instead, you see an arguement against allowing PCs to control battleships, and other than the IT folks, most rational people would agree that using a known insecure platform even to interface a critical control system is literal suicide.
I can imagine some potty mouthed naval Automation Engineer getting frustrated that the operator interface PCs crashed yet again and demanding someone get him a 24V supply and a laptop so he can rig up a "FUCKING fire button". :P
Unless you believe that people will attack a battleship with a bayonet, your point seems rather moot -- in modern warfare, humans *MUST* rely on their technology, because the targets are virtually indestructable to anything else.
Moving on, it's depressing that this was posted here. What started as a discussion among professionals about the state of their company has started to devolve into a disgusting ms bashing party.
Seeing the real thoughts and worries and pride of MS employees is infinitely more interesting than seeing some 12 year old blast Microsoft.
It's interesting to watch the comments as they unfold in the blog entry. Some of them are very frantic. "The company is going down! Abort! Abort! Abandon ship now!!" -- This from a company which has no real competition.
To be honest, I don't see what they're so upset about. It's done when it's done.
Doublespace/Drvspace is a wonderful show of Microsoft at work. As I recall, they were sued successfully by Stacker for more or less ripping off their product.
Could it be that your rational mind has constructed an irrational reason trying to explain the behaviour of your irrational mind?
You conceed on all counts that the game fell flat on it's face. Even the vaunted "Gameplay" that everyone in this thread seems to put on a pedestal is obviously lacking. There is no good reason to believe that those games were better. Yet, you end up giving it points for "imagination".
This reeks of whimsical nostolgia.
When I was a kid, Monopoly seemed like the most incredibly interesting and fun game ever. It was great -- terribly complex for a 10 or 12 year old, almost impossible to get through and entire game because it was so drawn out and complex, and the strategy seemed to surpass anything I'd seen before! However, playing it today, it seems like a terribly fatalistic game, with a simplistic joke of an economic model, where the players all fly towards the inevitable end-game.
It wasn't the game that had changed. It was myself. I'm willing to bet that if you had some of the cooler games today back when you were a kid, they'd put adventure to shame: Simple web slinging was the coolest thing in the early spider-man games. Imagine if you gave the youthful version of yourself Half-life 2 and the gravity gun? Hours of giddy fun and childish experiments.
Erm...........
Memmaker came free with DOS..........
You know, I make games by myself. I've learned something: You don't have to compete with the million sellers. I don't sell my works, because They're sometimes fun but entirely trivial and sometimes they break more copyrights than they actually contain(A nice quirk of quantum physics), but even if I did -- what then? If I beefed up Star Phalanx, which I developed in about 24 hours, with four episodes, more ships and weapons, and a couple powerups, It would likely only take another 24 hours max.
What number of sales at 10 dollars per registration would justify making another game? When you think about it, you realize it wouldn't take many.
omg! a gurl on teh innernets!
You know, this copy of Guild Wars on my drive just doesn't seem to be costing me any additional funds...
You're ignoring an important point: That's a gameplay element chosen intentionally.
The fact of the matter is, most people who play these games aren't very good, so to ensure that people will keep playing for more than a game or two, it's neccessary to make scoring easier. It's not realistic, mind you, but for most people, it's more fun to skate around with Wayne Gretzky scoring goals than to skate around with Wayne Gretsky being shown all the reasons why Wayne is the great one and the player is just some fat white collar bum playing video games on his 12 inch TV.
Actually, most game developers aren't that cruel anymore.
Forcing a player to learn a fictional language is part of the family of the lowest forms of length increasing gimmick.
Reminds me of playing Star Trek: 25th anniversary(I think it was...), and having some ridiculous puzzle. Even after I looked up the answer to the puzzle, it was like "Of course! The talderians have three fingers, so they'd be using base three! and stigmata is their favourite national holiday, so the first number must be 2! And cacodemons don't even exist as a literary reference in this universe, so the second number is 6!" -- a complete non-sequitor to the rest of the game at that point.
Actually, the simple solution is far simpler: Don't render polygons that are between the main character and the players line of sight. It's simple to implement, elegant, and allows the third person view to work without ever having to pull around because Raziel or Lara backed up against a wall.
Speaking of which, Defiance tried innovating with the camera. If the next game has the same "innovation", I'm going to have to destroy everyone the main designer has ever loved.
Final Fantasy 7 is just one game though. I loved Daggerfall because it plopped you in a world with no real guidance, just "Ok, here's a world. Go do stuff". Morrowind picked up on this and delivered an entire island, while utilizing modern technology and game design to make the world INTERESTING, so the terrain they had created wouldn't be ignored as it was in Daggerfall. Oblivion later this month may kill me. :P
I've played literally thousands of games for most of the older consoles.
I hate to break this news to you, but the vast, vast, vast majority of games for Atari, NES, and SNES were just clones. For every "Metal Warriors" or "Super Mario Brothers", there are 10, or even 100 "Generic sidescroller space shooter or platform game X!!!". Making matters worse, a LOT of those clones were simply horrible and unplayable.
As much as I hate to admit it, the massive bar for entry today has resulted in titles of ridiculously good design, ridiculously massive scope, and ridiculously complete immersion.
The sad part is that Star Trek engineers have obviously never heard of fail safe engineering, so running the warp drive through the same computer they use to play "Doom 274: The revenge of the return of the wrath of Cyberdemon" isn't out of the realm of possibility.
:P
Those who would disagree with me should remember all the times a failure made a process do something dangerous.
That was nerdy even by Slashdot standards.
The last thing you want to do for a well from is have it be something without an electrical pump
In other words, in this story, Bill Gates is a Marie Antoinette impersonator, telling the people who no longer have any flour for bread to eat cake, or the people living in the middle of nowhere to use some batteries and get a broadband connection.
You're ignoring my point: Innovation isn't just doing random stuff! Innovation COMES from somewhere, and demanding that games be "innovative" is to demand that games sacrifice themselves on the altar of innovation by ignoring whether such games are actually fun -- or indeed, made any more fun, by the very innovations that these people are spending months of their lives implementing.
The anti-videogame crowd are the same idiots who think that colleges are nothing but drunken orgies -- idiots in a moral panic with no facts to speak of.
Sadly, people who actually want to graduate with a useful degree can't got to the bisexual orgie beer binges. Similarly, indie games aren't made by raving mad corporations intent on making kids into killing machines, but by
Their attitude towards anyone who isn't themselves is disgusting and assumes the worst at every possible turn. Their behaviour and attitude does not justify lowering ourselves to respond to them.
This sounds good on the surface, but the truth of the matter is that the best kind of innovation takes something old and tired and breathes new life into it. For example, Half life was terribly innovative because of it's implementation of the plot, but it was still just a first person shooter.
The major problem with gaming intellectuals who demand innovation in all arenas is that true innovation doesn't come from a vacuum; it arrives either because the ingredients for the idea have accumulated, as was the case in quakes mlook, because hardware has finally come to the point that the innovation can be implemented properly, as was the case when Wolfenstein 3d introduced the viable first person shooter, or because someone with appropriate training has taken a non-gaming discipline and applied it to a gaming environment, as was the case when first person tactical military simulation became a viable genre.
Demanding innovation point-blank is a recipe for failure, as a thousand "Innovative" yet unplayable games will attest to.