This is totally false. The context of the game
is the restrictions that make the game challenging.
What you've said doesn't necessarily invalidate his statement. Chosing to cheat simply changes the restrictions you're playing against. Instead of "I can't attack more than ten times per minute or my character faints" to "I can't stay in local memory or Punkbuster kills my program." You're not really playing DeathSpank III anymore, you're playing a game you made up yourself.
I haven't actually messed with too many games, but in a few cases I've played the "What happens if I mess with the data files" game. I'm not intending to win the game more easily, I'm playing with it to see what I can accomplish. Recently while playing the most awful Big Rigs I spend a half hour playing the "Can I actually play using the motorcyle data files the developer left laying around on the CD?" (I won that game. Although I still lost, since I still own the game. Egad...)
All that said, most cheaters aren't really interested in the game of playing with their computers. Myself, I typically cheat in single player game when I am longer enjoying the game but want to see the ending. I'm not playing a game. Cheaters on online games aren't studying the interesting problem of modifying a running program; they want to be 1337 in the game. Indeed, as you say, cheating tends to be boring for most people.
So Koster has a point in theory, but in practice he's basically wrong. I just wouldn't go so far as to say that he's "totally" false. Just mostly.
This looks suspiciously like the old Games Workshop game Space Hulk. Which might not be a bad thing, since Space Hulk was a blast to play and has been out of print for years.
Sony is dieing? Wow. Someone tell the local electronics shops who all carry various Sony brand televisions, receivers, DVD players, and the like. Someone tell the local video stores and movie theatres showing Sony Pictures movies. Be sure to warn measely 500,000 players of EverQuest.
XBoxes outselling PS2s? Hmmm, it couldn't be because the PS2 installed base is so large that there aren't many more people to sell to.
XBox 2 before PS3? Clearly the PS3 is doomed, just like the Sega Dreamcast doomed the PS2.
The iPod is killing the Walkman? A clear sign of doom. Hey, I heard that the iPod is also killing 8-tracks! The end of the world is nigh!
And of course, the PSP's failure is the key. Sure, Sony has managed to exist all of these years without a portable system, yet suddenly it's absolutely critical and proof that they're doomed.
We'll see where we are in a year or two, but I'm confident that Sony will be alive and well. Sony will remain profitable. In a worst realistic case scenario Sony might fall to second place in total installed base, but even then it would be a close race.
Nice conspiracy theory. I don't buy it, but it's very cute.
Some specific problems with your theory:
First, Slashdot itself runs basically the same type of service Roland does; they link to other articles. Hell, Slashdot doesn't even have to go looking for the articles, they expect readers to submit them. Slashdot is sure as hell making more money each month than Roland. Should we hate Slashdot as well?
Second, is Roland (and Slashdot) providing a service? Well, you're here, aren't you? Roland serves the same purpose many blogs do, he collects information. Maybe that's not worth anything to you, but it's hardly an evil scheme. Is he pimping his own site via Slashdot? Perhaps. So what? Apparently the Slashdot editors find his submissions to be worthy of posting. On that note...
Fourth, you're seriously suggesting that Slashdot is involved some sort of evil plan to scam $647 a month? That's chump change t to Slashdot.
Fifth, and perhaps most importantly, you suggest that the $647 is something that we should give the slightest crap about. If you were paying him that money you might have a right to complain that he wasn't justifying that money, but you're not. You're getting a free service, the only cost to you is potentially being exposed to some ads. If you don't like it, don't take advantage of that free service.
The worst non-crazy charges you can levy are that Roland pimps himself on Slashdot for hits and that Slashdot editors are lazy and let Roland pimp himself. Wow, life's tough.
People like to say "you are more likely to die in a car than in a plane", because lots more people die in car crashes than in plane crashes,...
People like to say it because commercial aviation (the only kind most of us realistically have access to) is much safer than flying. For every 100,000,000 miles traveled by car we see about 1.7 deaths. For every 100,000,000 miles traveled by commericial aviation, we see about 0.7 deaths. (source) Even including the September 11th attacks research shows flying is much safer than driving. So if you're planning your trip across country, you are about twice as safe flying than driving. (Of course, in both cases the odds of dying are very small.) Flying is not a risky activity by any realistic measure. Noting the apparently large number of famous people who died in airplanes is a distraction. First, many of these people aren't flying commercial airlines like the rest of us. The numbers are very different if you're flying yourself or on a special flight. Those are special cases, including them is like including crashes in Nascar races in driving safety measurements. Second, any death by flight gets much more coverage than an auto death, especially if someone famous is involved. We're getting distorted news. Third, famous people tend to fly more. If you exclusively fly your chances of getting in an auto accident are zero. It's still safer than if you'd chosen to travel those miles by car.
The lack of ACLs is a major impediment to uptake of Linux in the business community.
"The business community" finds file systems confusing, so they stick everything into one giant directory with nearly worthless filenames. When they want to share a file with someone else they stumble around until they figure out how to turn on sharing and disable any sort of security.
ACLs are great, but most users, including most businesses, wouldn't know what to do with them. Clueful users are the exception, not the rule. Furthermore, anyone with enough of a clue to 1. seriously consider Linux and 2. understand and desire ACLs certainly has enough of a clue to discover that Linux has ACLs.
Resier4 or XFS is what UNIX should have started with...
ACL's make more sense, and UNIX should have had them from the start.
Just to check, you know that Unix started in 1971(ish), right? Expecting filesystems developed in the last ten years targetting modern hardware to have existed thirty years ago on hardware less powerful than the PalmOS device in my pocket seems a little optimistic.
You touch on some things that Unix (and it's children) can definately do better, but you seem out of touch with Unix's history. Unix evolved to where it is today over thirty-five years. Doing everything all at once wasn't an option; indeed Grand Visions generally fail while something Good Enough that continually improves (warts and all) generally wins. Thus Worse is Better (that's just an excerpt from the original article, see it all here.
I've carried (legally licensed) for 10 years. Thankfully, I've never had to shoot. But I have diffused two situations by drawing the weapon.
So (to crudely abuse some statistics), you live in an environment where you feel threatened enough to pull out a gun every 5 years? I'd be interested in knowing where you live. Mostly so I can avoid such a dangerous place.
I fully support your right to carry that gun and to even use it in defense if necessary. But I notice that most of the "see how guns protect us" stories talk about how displaying the gun was the deterrent. The problem is that we don't really know if the gun changed anything, or if you just scared off someone (or a group) who wouldn't really have endangered you or your property. Maybe in your specific situation is was quite clear ("Gimme your money!"), but in general it always sounds over-hyped. It's that sort of fuzzy thinking that turns lots of people off to pro-gun arguments.
Re:The reasoning is still bad
on
NBA Rejects EA Deal
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· Score: 2, Interesting
...ultimately the company will select the option that will be most profitable for them.
Indeed, these days a large company will typically select the option that will be most profitable in the short term for them. Does the plan doom them in the long run? So what! Will the plan given another company (EA) more control over them, seriously hampering future options and profits? The CEO will be long gone.
The NFL made a stupid decision; they may make more money for the next few years, but they've handed control off to EA. Where once they had several companies fighting yearly to give them money, there is no only EA. This will weaken the other companies, making it harder for them to compete. This in turn means EA has little incentive to push themselves.
While the video game industry is clearly thriving, it's not yet time to count Hollywood down for the count. The only way to claim that the movie industry is smaller than the games industry is to ignore big chunks of Hollywood's revenue.
Ron Gilbert gives a good explaination over at Grumpy Gamer.
It's a shame that the rebranding seriously damaged the show. Extended Play was brilliant; it was one man, clearly a serious gamer, who spoke directly to the audience. There were occasional funny bits, but it felt like a fellow gamer sharing is considering thoughts on which games I should get. Then the rebranding. X-Play? Wow, how extreme. I'm so glad they trashed an on-topic and amusing name for another EXTREME NAME. While Morgan has grown to fill her role quite well, I can do without the cute banter. I want reviews, not mid-grade jokes at each other's expense. The stage is basically irrelevant (since we should be seeing reviews), which is why the old arcade was so good; it was related to the topic. Building a set was overkill. Ah well.
I didn't see the awards show, but I would guess that it was pretty representative of the game industry.
Indeed. It's a little known fact, but most video games are developed by rappers and Victoria's Secret models. Few people truly appreciate Snoop Dog's mad-3d pipeline optimizing skillz.
A few days later I was called in by our VP and told that I needed to start top posting like everyone else.
While you were burning your bridges by pointing out that he was wrong, did you also point out that perhaps as Vice-President he should have something better to do than meet with individual employs about the format of their email messages?
(A good pair of stories on the matter from Joel Spolsky)
I sympathize; we all have to deal with irrational behavior from superiors. Anyone who claims that capitalism naturally leads to highly efficient behavior clearly hasn't actually worked in a large company.
The Lord of the Rings board game is a blast. The Sauron tracking board is great: as the hobbit's morale falls (because they fail challenges or are tempted by the ring), they move toward Sauron. As Sauron gains power he moves toward the hobbits. You'll typically have to sacrifice at least a few hobbits to Sauron to win. The game is very cooperation oriented; Sauran is controlled by the board itself while the players are the hobbits. Typically you'll have players/hobbits sacrifice themselves for the good of the group. "I don't think I can make it. Here, I'll let you take the last token of Hope. Even though it will doom me, hopefully the rest of you can make it." Once you're beating the game regularlly you can start playing to maximize score or increase the difficultly (giving Sauran an edge). It's always exciting since you never know if bad luck will doom the party. On the down side, after a dozen or so games we pretty much understand the strategy. It's still fun, but the only surprises are from the order of the deck, not the big picture.
On the flip side, it's actually easier to teach than chess (fewer rules, no difference in the pieces)...
As someone who has casually played Chess for years and has spent the last month or so learning Go, I'm less certain about this.
In terms of learning the rules, Go is certainly simplier, but it's jarring to many people. While Chess requires memorizing a bunch of arbitrary moves, the core ideas are obvious to people: pieces move from space to space, you kill (capture) other pieces, you're trying to get the leader (king), you're on one side the other guy is on the other now charge. In Go you play on intersections, you surround territory (and have to learn to recognize when surrounded territory is still in play), you rarely remove pieces. As The Interactive Way to Go puts it, "Go is sharing game." That's a weird idea for most western game players.
Similarlly, basic Chess strategy is relatively obvious; you get surprisingly far with just rough ordering of the value of the pieces (pawn < knight or bishop < rook < queen < king) and a few simple strategies (claim the middle, threaten as much space as possible). This based on my own experiences. I know I suck and my strategies are childish at best, yet I stomp most people I play. It's rare to have a "wouldn't it be fun to play" with someone who plays seriously. Of course, against a serious player I'd be crushed flat.
Go strategy, the on other hand, is harder to understand. You're confronted with a huge number of possible moves (I'm only just becoming comfortable with 9x9 boards; full 19x19 boards scare me). The early game tends to look confused and scattered; you're looking for general patterns. At first you'll be spending your time fretting over forming eyes and seeing ladders. I'm starting to grasp that I'll often need to ignore opportunities to capture or block my opponent's advance because I know I can block them later and can make an offensive move instead. (This is also true in Chess to an extent, but I'm finding I need to track many more "keep an eye on now, but do nothing now" positions, again on the small 9x9 board.)
I'm enjoying the heck out of Go, but I'm not convinced it's necessarily easier that Chess for a new player. To make a crude generalization, I suspect most "Western" minds more easily mesh with a small pile of rules and straightforward strategy than simple rules but holistic strategy.
That said, I encourage everyone to take some time to learn Go.
The Interactive Way to Go is a great gentle introduction with lots of Java boards to practice concepts on.
It added ton of features that influenced FPSes for years to come...
While lots of people buy games for features, features don't necessarily mean fun. Halo might be a noteworthy step forward in FPSers, but it doesn't mean it doesn't suck.
As to the specific features; the AI was interesting, but didn't do anything for me. I certainly felt more challenged by the grossly unbalanced power lavels ("let's empty multiple assault rifle clips into a single mid-grade bad-guy"), than super-clever AI. It may be an important milestone, but it didn't make the game fun for me.
The graphics were quite nice. The graphics are also quite nice in Doom 3, but similarlly repetative. Ultimately it's not the technology; it's how you use it. I find World of Warcraft way more fun to look at than EverQuest 2, but EQ2 has the technically superior graphics engine. Doom 3 has a stunning lighting model, but fails to be as creepy and compelling as parts of Half-Life 2.
As to the controls, they weren't some brand new thing. I'd been using identical or effectively identical controls in other console FPSes before the X-Box was released. What Halo got right was more subtle; I can't even put my finger on it. Halo felt right, while I was certainly slower than a mouse, I didn't feel gimpy like I do in every other console FPS. They balanced something about the inputs just right and they deserve recognition for that.
Mind you, I hold nothing against Halo 2; the game looks really good and has lots of cool ideas. It may be good enough to sell me my very own X-Box.
I would suggest that whenever someone starts slinging the word "suck" around, they are probably talking about their opinion, not scientifically proven facts.
If you want repetition in gameplay maybe you want to take a look at Doom3.
Indeed. And that why, despite being deeply tempted by the gorgeous graphics I don't own a copy of Doom 3; by all accounts it's repetitive, boring, and (ultimately) sucks.
The sequel beat the record achieved by the original game, which took 2 years to achieve.
It took the first one two years because it sucked.
Modern console gamers seem to have forgotten this. Whenever I see a game reviewed as a potential "Halo killer", I weep for the reviewer, who clearly has Alzheimer's.
Do people remember the "buzz" about the X-Box launch and Halo. Sure, those people who had wrapped their egos so tightly into Microsoft's success claimed that rainbows were coming out their asses, but the more realistic gamers sighed with a "Well, I guess at least Halo's not bad." Halo's most shining characterastic was that most of the other launch titles were dreadful. The key word in Halo was repitition. You'll see the same enemies over and over again. You (and they) will use the same tactics over and over again. The levels brought their own level of boring repetition, so painful that Penny Arcade compared it to pounding nails through their dicks.
Halo was redeamed by its multiplayer which I understand is very good. I must yield that it had exceptional control for a console based first person shooter. But Halo took a long time to move 5 million units because the single player simply wasn't compelling. It only did as well as it did at first because there were no other real options. Later on multi-player became popular.
Thus, copying old artistic works/abandonware could be detrimental to current creation. For instance, if copyright law was 42 years, most black&white film archives would be out of copyright --- I'd expect a lot of reruns of those instead of recent creations on TV.
(To be clear, I'm poking at this particular point; I agree with the general message of the poster.)
Indeed. Of course, if you can't come up with anything better than 42 year old media, maybe you suck and need to create something better. There are plenty of books in the public domain; you can get thousands online for free from Project Gutenberg. They can read new books for free at their local library. Yet the publishing industry continues to do just fine. People want new shiny things now They might be willing to wait a few years for a cheap or free version, but they're not going to wait 42 years. Any copyright length of more than, say, 20 years, will protect the vast majority of the market value of both the original work and newer competing works.
Re: Why is copyright now Opt-Out instead of Opt-In.
Primarily because of the Berne Convention, an international agreement on copyrights. The standard everyone could agree upon was automatic copyrights. By agreeing to implement the terms of the Berne Convention we got lots of good stuff (notably other Berne Convention countries must respect our copyrights), but we had to go Opt-Out.
However, I think it's a good plan. Filing for copyright is a bloody nuisance and raises the barrier to profit from ones work. It also means that an accidental failure to file for copyright. (This happened to the movie It's a Wonderful Life. On the other hand, it's this failure that made it popular today; networks can air it without paying anyone.)
Our copyright system is broken, but I don't think going Opt-In is the necessary fix. Shorter durations (Berne only requires Life+50) would be an immediate improvement with do measurable down side. (A publisher isn't going to offer an auther less money because they'll only have the rights for 50 years instead of 75. Averaged across all books years 51-75 are basically worthless. The occasional book is an exception, but it's basically impossible to guess which will still have value in 50 years.)
Another option is a blended form: The initial period is free, but you have to pay to extend it after a period. I believe Professor Lessig is pushing for this. I'm picturing something like 20 years for free, but then you have to pay for renewal at increasingly expensive fees. Getting another 20 or so years would be reasonable for any work making money, getting another 100 would be prohibitively expensive for any for the most profitable of enterprises. Most works would become free after 20 years, long past their profitable stage.
(Quick primer for people unfamiliar with these: TADS is an authoring system and playing system for text adventure games. Z-Code is a platform independent bytecode for text adventure games. Z-Code games were originally produced by Infocom using proprietary tools.
Inform is a modern authoring system that also outputs Z-Code.)
TADS has its advantages (a friend of mine who wrote the above mentioned "Magocracy" used it to great effect), but it also has serious disadvantages that must be weighed. Perhaps its most serious disadvantage is that it simply isn't as portable as Z-Code. TADS pretty much has a single interpreter and iffy specs. The only real specs for TADS games is the TADS interpreter itself. Z-Code is well documented at this point with many interpreters being available. TADS interpreters require relatively modern processor and memory while Z-Code was designed to run on home machines from the early 1980s.
All of this boils down to: my old Palm III happily plays very recent Z-Code games but has no hope of running any TADS game. Thanks to Frobnitz I've got 9 games sitting on my Palm right now. Z-Code is so stable that I'm happily running a 4 year old version of Frobnitz
While the interpreter support for graphics is but a pale shadow of TADS, graphics are really the point, are they? Yes, some games greatly benefit from them (I do like the "Earth and Sky" games), they're hardly a requirement for most games. Beyond that the Z-Code spec is quite flexible.
As for the development language, while Inform does have some strange quirks, it's a fine language that reasonably expresses intent. And while I'm a C++ and Perl coder at heart, I'm not so attached to a particular syntax that I'll pick a language based on it.
Ultimately it's telling that TADS games rarely come up in lists of "great interactive fiction you should play." It's dominated by Z-Code games. Apparently Z-Code isn't that limiting.
My first month at my first professional job I got
to visit TSR on a business trip. This was after the Wizards of the Coast buyout but before the move out of the Lake Geneva office.
If such a thing might interest you, I offer
my observations on one of TSR's final days.
Does that mean that I have to become a Heroin addict before I can say, "Heroin use is bad". Do I have to kill someone before I can come out against murder?
Murder's not really up for debate; there isn't a sizable group of people arguing for legalization of murder. So it's a silly comparison.
Durgs, however, are a better comparision. Illegal drug use is rampant, there are people calling to make them legal. In such an environment a simple "Heroin use is bad" from someone unable to provide context is useless. To be able to honestly say that drugs are bad you need good information about the drugs. Doing drugs would be one unattractive option. Speaking with drug users would be another. Reading and evaluating research on drug use would be another. But haven't heard word of mouth that heroin is bad and using it as a basis for a national campaign against heroin would be a foolish.
Thus, it's reasonable to ask that someone condeming specific games be familiar with those games. Maybe they didn't play them, but they should be able to give concrete examples of issues found in the games. That they misspelled many of the games is telling; it suggests that they didn't do their research. Without supporting evidence from them I can reasonably disregard their claims.
All that said, it may not be an effect debating tactic...
Re:If/When Valve goes out of business...
on
Review: Half-Life 2
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· Score: 1
But certainly if Valve is going to go by the wayside they'll be able to patch Steam so it's not reliant on Steam servers any longer.
Because companies that are going out of business are surely going to invest a bit more money doing right by their customers. The debtors outside who are screaming for blood won't mind at all if a potentially revenue source were given away.
Assuming anything other than the worst case is delusional. When things go badly enough that a company needs to shut down you can expect to be screwed.
Slashdot Mirror
What you've said doesn't necessarily invalidate his statement. Chosing to cheat simply changes the restrictions you're playing against. Instead of "I can't attack more than ten times per minute or my character faints" to "I can't stay in local memory or Punkbuster kills my program." You're not really playing DeathSpank III anymore, you're playing a game you made up yourself.
I haven't actually messed with too many games, but in a few cases I've played the "What happens if I mess with the data files" game. I'm not intending to win the game more easily, I'm playing with it to see what I can accomplish. Recently while playing the most awful Big Rigs I spend a half hour playing the "Can I actually play using the motorcyle data files the developer left laying around on the CD?" (I won that game. Although I still lost, since I still own the game. Egad...)
All that said, most cheaters aren't really interested in the game of playing with their computers. Myself, I typically cheat in single player game when I am longer enjoying the game but want to see the ending. I'm not playing a game. Cheaters on online games aren't studying the interesting problem of modifying a running program; they want to be 1337 in the game. Indeed, as you say, cheating tends to be boring for most people.
So Koster has a point in theory, but in practice he's basically wrong. I just wouldn't go so far as to say that he's "totally" false. Just mostly.
This looks suspiciously like the old Games Workshop game Space Hulk. Which might not be a bad thing, since Space Hulk was a blast to play and has been out of print for years.
XBoxes outselling PS2s? Hmmm, it couldn't be because the PS2 installed base is so large that there aren't many more people to sell to.
XBox 2 before PS3? Clearly the PS3 is doomed, just like the Sega Dreamcast doomed the PS2.
The iPod is killing the Walkman? A clear sign of doom. Hey, I heard that the iPod is also killing 8-tracks! The end of the world is nigh!
And of course, the PSP's failure is the key. Sure, Sony has managed to exist all of these years without a portable system, yet suddenly it's absolutely critical and proof that they're doomed.
We'll see where we are in a year or two, but I'm confident that Sony will be alive and well. Sony will remain profitable. In a worst realistic case scenario Sony might fall to second place in total installed base, but even then it would be a close race.
Nice conspiracy theory. I don't buy it, but it's very cute.
Some specific problems with your theory:
First, Slashdot itself runs basically the same type of service Roland does; they link to other articles. Hell, Slashdot doesn't even have to go looking for the articles, they expect readers to submit them. Slashdot is sure as hell making more money each month than Roland. Should we hate Slashdot as well?
Second, is Roland (and Slashdot) providing a service? Well, you're here, aren't you? Roland serves the same purpose many blogs do, he collects information. Maybe that's not worth anything to you, but it's hardly an evil scheme. Is he pimping his own site via Slashdot? Perhaps. So what? Apparently the Slashdot editors find his submissions to be worthy of posting. On that note...
Fourth, you're seriously suggesting that Slashdot is involved some sort of evil plan to scam $647 a month? That's chump change t to Slashdot.
Fifth, and perhaps most importantly, you suggest that the $647 is something that we should give the slightest crap about. If you were paying him that money you might have a right to complain that he wasn't justifying that money, but you're not. You're getting a free service, the only cost to you is potentially being exposed to some ads. If you don't like it, don't take advantage of that free service.
The worst non-crazy charges you can levy are that Roland pimps himself on Slashdot for hits and that Slashdot editors are lazy and let Roland pimp himself. Wow, life's tough.
People like to say it because commercial aviation (the only kind most of us realistically have access to) is much safer than flying. For every 100,000,000 miles traveled by car we see about 1.7 deaths. For every 100,000,000 miles traveled by commericial aviation, we see about 0.7 deaths. (source) Even including the September 11th attacks research shows flying is much safer than driving. So if you're planning your trip across country, you are about twice as safe flying than driving. (Of course, in both cases the odds of dying are very small.) Flying is not a risky activity by any realistic measure. Noting the apparently large number of famous people who died in airplanes is a distraction. First, many of these people aren't flying commercial airlines like the rest of us. The numbers are very different if you're flying yourself or on a special flight. Those are special cases, including them is like including crashes in Nascar races in driving safety measurements. Second, any death by flight gets much more coverage than an auto death, especially if someone famous is involved. We're getting distorted news. Third, famous people tend to fly more. If you exclusively fly your chances of getting in an auto accident are zero. It's still safer than if you'd chosen to travel those miles by car.
"The business community" finds file systems confusing, so they stick everything into one giant directory with nearly worthless filenames. When they want to share a file with someone else they stumble around until they figure out how to turn on sharing and disable any sort of security.
ACLs are great, but most users, including most businesses, wouldn't know what to do with them. Clueful users are the exception, not the rule. Furthermore, anyone with enough of a clue to 1. seriously consider Linux and 2. understand and desire ACLs certainly has enough of a clue to discover that Linux has ACLs.
Just to check, you know that Unix started in 1971(ish), right? Expecting filesystems developed in the last ten years targetting modern hardware to have existed thirty years ago on hardware less powerful than the PalmOS device in my pocket seems a little optimistic.
You touch on some things that Unix (and it's children) can definately do better, but you seem out of touch with Unix's history. Unix evolved to where it is today over thirty-five years. Doing everything all at once wasn't an option; indeed Grand Visions generally fail while something Good Enough that continually improves (warts and all) generally wins. Thus Worse is Better (that's just an excerpt from the original article, see it all here.
So (to crudely abuse some statistics), you live in an environment where you feel threatened enough to pull out a gun every 5 years? I'd be interested in knowing where you live. Mostly so I can avoid such a dangerous place.
I fully support your right to carry that gun and to even use it in defense if necessary. But I notice that most of the "see how guns protect us" stories talk about how displaying the gun was the deterrent. The problem is that we don't really know if the gun changed anything, or if you just scared off someone (or a group) who wouldn't really have endangered you or your property. Maybe in your specific situation is was quite clear ("Gimme your money!"), but in general it always sounds over-hyped. It's that sort of fuzzy thinking that turns lots of people off to pro-gun arguments.
Why would you base a case design on such a crappy movie?
Indeed, these days a large company will typically select the option that will be most profitable in the short term for them. Does the plan doom them in the long run? So what! Will the plan given another company (EA) more control over them, seriously hampering future options and profits? The CEO will be long gone.
The NFL made a stupid decision; they may make more money for the next few years, but they've handed control off to EA. Where once they had several companies fighting yearly to give them money, there is no only EA. This will weaken the other companies, making it harder for them to compete. This in turn means EA has little incentive to push themselves.
While the video game industry is clearly thriving, it's not yet time to count Hollywood down for the count. The only way to claim that the movie industry is smaller than the games industry is to ignore big chunks of Hollywood's revenue. Ron Gilbert gives a good explaination over at Grumpy Gamer.
It's a shame that the rebranding seriously damaged the show. Extended Play was brilliant; it was one man, clearly a serious gamer, who spoke directly to the audience. There were occasional funny bits, but it felt like a fellow gamer sharing is considering thoughts on which games I should get. Then the rebranding. X-Play? Wow, how extreme. I'm so glad they trashed an on-topic and amusing name for another EXTREME NAME. While Morgan has grown to fill her role quite well, I can do without the cute banter. I want reviews, not mid-grade jokes at each other's expense. The stage is basically irrelevant (since we should be seeing reviews), which is why the old arcade was so good; it was related to the topic. Building a set was overkill. Ah well.
Indeed. It's a little known fact, but most video games are developed by rappers and Victoria's Secret models. Few people truly appreciate Snoop Dog's mad-3d pipeline optimizing skillz.
While you were burning your bridges by pointing out that he was wrong, did you also point out that perhaps as Vice-President he should have something better to do than meet with individual employs about the format of their email messages? (A good pair of stories on the matter from Joel Spolsky)
I sympathize; we all have to deal with irrational behavior from superiors. Anyone who claims that capitalism naturally leads to highly efficient behavior clearly hasn't actually worked in a large company.
The Lord of the Rings board game is a blast. The Sauron tracking board is great: as the hobbit's morale falls (because they fail challenges or are tempted by the ring), they move toward Sauron. As Sauron gains power he moves toward the hobbits. You'll typically have to sacrifice at least a few hobbits to Sauron to win. The game is very cooperation oriented; Sauran is controlled by the board itself while the players are the hobbits. Typically you'll have players/hobbits sacrifice themselves for the good of the group. "I don't think I can make it. Here, I'll let you take the last token of Hope. Even though it will doom me, hopefully the rest of you can make it." Once you're beating the game regularlly you can start playing to maximize score or increase the difficultly (giving Sauran an edge). It's always exciting since you never know if bad luck will doom the party. On the down side, after a dozen or so games we pretty much understand the strategy. It's still fun, but the only surprises are from the order of the deck, not the big picture.
As someone who has casually played Chess for years and has spent the last month or so learning Go, I'm less certain about this.
In terms of learning the rules, Go is certainly simplier, but it's jarring to many people. While Chess requires memorizing a bunch of arbitrary moves, the core ideas are obvious to people: pieces move from space to space, you kill (capture) other pieces, you're trying to get the leader (king), you're on one side the other guy is on the other now charge. In Go you play on intersections, you surround territory (and have to learn to recognize when surrounded territory is still in play), you rarely remove pieces. As The Interactive Way to Go puts it, "Go is sharing game." That's a weird idea for most western game players.
Similarlly, basic Chess strategy is relatively obvious; you get surprisingly far with just rough ordering of the value of the pieces (pawn < knight or bishop < rook < queen < king) and a few simple strategies (claim the middle, threaten as much space as possible). This based on my own experiences. I know I suck and my strategies are childish at best, yet I stomp most people I play. It's rare to have a "wouldn't it be fun to play" with someone who plays seriously. Of course, against a serious player I'd be crushed flat.
Go strategy, the on other hand, is harder to understand. You're confronted with a huge number of possible moves (I'm only just becoming comfortable with 9x9 boards; full 19x19 boards scare me). The early game tends to look confused and scattered; you're looking for general patterns. At first you'll be spending your time fretting over forming eyes and seeing ladders. I'm starting to grasp that I'll often need to ignore opportunities to capture or block my opponent's advance because I know I can block them later and can make an offensive move instead. (This is also true in Chess to an extent, but I'm finding I need to track many more "keep an eye on now, but do nothing now" positions, again on the small 9x9 board.)
I'm enjoying the heck out of Go, but I'm not convinced it's necessarily easier that Chess for a new player. To make a crude generalization, I suspect most "Western" minds more easily mesh with a small pile of rules and straightforward strategy than simple rules but holistic strategy.
That said, I encourage everyone to take some time to learn Go. The Interactive Way to Go is a great gentle introduction with lots of Java boards to practice concepts on.
While lots of people buy games for features, features don't necessarily mean fun. Halo might be a noteworthy step forward in FPSers, but it doesn't mean it doesn't suck.
As to the specific features; the AI was interesting, but didn't do anything for me. I certainly felt more challenged by the grossly unbalanced power lavels ("let's empty multiple assault rifle clips into a single mid-grade bad-guy"), than super-clever AI. It may be an important milestone, but it didn't make the game fun for me.
The graphics were quite nice. The graphics are also quite nice in Doom 3, but similarlly repetative. Ultimately it's not the technology; it's how you use it. I find World of Warcraft way more fun to look at than EverQuest 2, but EQ2 has the technically superior graphics engine. Doom 3 has a stunning lighting model, but fails to be as creepy and compelling as parts of Half-Life 2.
As to the controls, they weren't some brand new thing. I'd been using identical or effectively identical controls in other console FPSes before the X-Box was released. What Halo got right was more subtle; I can't even put my finger on it. Halo felt right, while I was certainly slower than a mouse, I didn't feel gimpy like I do in every other console FPS. They balanced something about the inputs just right and they deserve recognition for that.
Mind you, I hold nothing against Halo 2; the game looks really good and has lots of cool ideas. It may be good enough to sell me my very own X-Box.
I would suggest that whenever someone starts slinging the word "suck" around, they are probably talking about their opinion, not scientifically proven facts.
Indeed. And that why, despite being deeply tempted by the gorgeous graphics I don't own a copy of Doom 3; by all accounts it's repetitive, boring, and (ultimately) sucks.
It took the first one two years because it sucked.
Modern console gamers seem to have forgotten this. Whenever I see a game reviewed as a potential "Halo killer", I weep for the reviewer, who clearly has Alzheimer's.
Do people remember the "buzz" about the X-Box launch and Halo. Sure, those people who had wrapped their egos so tightly into Microsoft's success claimed that rainbows were coming out their asses, but the more realistic gamers sighed with a "Well, I guess at least Halo's not bad." Halo's most shining characterastic was that most of the other launch titles were dreadful. The key word in Halo was repitition. You'll see the same enemies over and over again. You (and they) will use the same tactics over and over again. The levels brought their own level of boring repetition, so painful that Penny Arcade compared it to pounding nails through their dicks.
Halo was redeamed by its multiplayer which I understand is very good. I must yield that it had exceptional control for a console based first person shooter. But Halo took a long time to move 5 million units because the single player simply wasn't compelling. It only did as well as it did at first because there were no other real options. Later on multi-player became popular.
(To be clear, I'm poking at this particular point; I agree with the general message of the poster.)
Indeed. Of course, if you can't come up with anything better than 42 year old media, maybe you suck and need to create something better. There are plenty of books in the public domain; you can get thousands online for free from Project Gutenberg. They can read new books for free at their local library. Yet the publishing industry continues to do just fine. People want new shiny things now They might be willing to wait a few years for a cheap or free version, but they're not going to wait 42 years. Any copyright length of more than, say, 20 years, will protect the vast majority of the market value of both the original work and newer competing works.
Primarily because of the Berne Convention, an international agreement on copyrights. The standard everyone could agree upon was automatic copyrights. By agreeing to implement the terms of the Berne Convention we got lots of good stuff (notably other Berne Convention countries must respect our copyrights), but we had to go Opt-Out.
However, I think it's a good plan. Filing for copyright is a bloody nuisance and raises the barrier to profit from ones work. It also means that an accidental failure to file for copyright. (This happened to the movie It's a Wonderful Life . On the other hand, it's this failure that made it popular today; networks can air it without paying anyone.)
Our copyright system is broken, but I don't think going Opt-In is the necessary fix. Shorter durations (Berne only requires Life+50) would be an immediate improvement with do measurable down side. (A publisher isn't going to offer an auther less money because they'll only have the rights for 50 years instead of 75. Averaged across all books years 51-75 are basically worthless. The occasional book is an exception, but it's basically impossible to guess which will still have value in 50 years.)
Another option is a blended form: The initial period is free, but you have to pay to extend it after a period. I believe Professor Lessig is pushing for this. I'm picturing something like 20 years for free, but then you have to pay for renewal at increasingly expensive fees. Getting another 20 or so years would be reasonable for any work making money, getting another 100 would be prohibitively expensive for any for the most profitable of enterprises. Most works would become free after 20 years, long past their profitable stage.
(Quick primer for people unfamiliar with these: TADS is an authoring system and playing system for text adventure games. Z-Code is a platform independent bytecode for text adventure games. Z-Code games were originally produced by Infocom using proprietary tools. Inform is a modern authoring system that also outputs Z-Code.)
TADS has its advantages (a friend of mine who wrote the above mentioned "Magocracy" used it to great effect), but it also has serious disadvantages that must be weighed. Perhaps its most serious disadvantage is that it simply isn't as portable as Z-Code. TADS pretty much has a single interpreter and iffy specs. The only real specs for TADS games is the TADS interpreter itself. Z-Code is well documented at this point with many interpreters being available. TADS interpreters require relatively modern processor and memory while Z-Code was designed to run on home machines from the early 1980s.
All of this boils down to: my old Palm III happily plays very recent Z-Code games but has no hope of running any TADS game. Thanks to Frobnitz I've got 9 games sitting on my Palm right now. Z-Code is so stable that I'm happily running a 4 year old version of Frobnitz
While the interpreter support for graphics is but a pale shadow of TADS, graphics are really the point, are they? Yes, some games greatly benefit from them (I do like the "Earth and Sky" games), they're hardly a requirement for most games. Beyond that the Z-Code spec is quite flexible.
As for the development language, while Inform does have some strange quirks, it's a fine language that reasonably expresses intent. And while I'm a C++ and Perl coder at heart, I'm not so attached to a particular syntax that I'll pick a language based on it.
Ultimately it's telling that TADS games rarely come up in lists of "great interactive fiction you should play." It's dominated by Z-Code games. Apparently Z-Code isn't that limiting.
Don't get me wrong, TADS does have advantages. It shines in graphics integration. The author of Inform has said, "This author at least has long admired the elegance of Mike Roberts's Text Adventure Development System (TADS)," in his own book on Inform and goes on to mention some specific features he likes. Personally I disagree with enough of the library design that I'm tempted to replace it with the Platypus library. But since I'm personally interested in maximizing the number people who can play what I write and I don't have any truly serious problems with Inform or Z-Code, I'll be using that.
(For anyone sold on my little spiel, check out the excellent and free Inform Beginner's Guide and Designer's Manual , the free development software, and an interpreter. Of course, TADS is just as free, so check TADS out yourself.)
My first month at my first professional job I got to visit TSR on a business trip. This was after the Wizards of the Coast buyout but before the move out of the Lake Geneva office. If such a thing might interest you, I offer my observations on one of TSR's final days.
Murder's not really up for debate; there isn't a sizable group of people arguing for legalization of murder. So it's a silly comparison.
Durgs, however, are a better comparision. Illegal drug use is rampant, there are people calling to make them legal. In such an environment a simple "Heroin use is bad" from someone unable to provide context is useless. To be able to honestly say that drugs are bad you need good information about the drugs. Doing drugs would be one unattractive option. Speaking with drug users would be another. Reading and evaluating research on drug use would be another. But haven't heard word of mouth that heroin is bad and using it as a basis for a national campaign against heroin would be a foolish.
Thus, it's reasonable to ask that someone condeming specific games be familiar with those games. Maybe they didn't play them, but they should be able to give concrete examples of issues found in the games. That they misspelled many of the games is telling; it suggests that they didn't do their research. Without supporting evidence from them I can reasonably disregard their claims.
All that said, it may not be an effect debating tactic...
Because companies that are going out of business are surely going to invest a bit more money doing right by their customers. The debtors outside who are screaming for blood won't mind at all if a potentially revenue source were given away.
Assuming anything other than the worst case is delusional. When things go badly enough that a company needs to shut down you can expect to be screwed.