The statement was true. The MPAA and RIAA for that mater promote 1st amendment rights. They advocate free speech for musicians and movie producers. They aggressively block attempts to sensor what they want to say.
They block attempts by the GOVERNMENT to censor what artists can say, but they willfully censor artists themselves. With the vast majority of the movie theaters in this nation controlled by the MPAA and its standards, any attempt to freely reach an audience requires that you jump through hoops by A) making a movie with the MPAA, B) making sure that its content isn't too controversial to be carried by an MPAA distributor (The Passion is the most recent example of this), C) making sure that it's censored so it won't get an NC-17 rating (like Quentin Tarantino did with Kill Bill and the House of Blue Leaves scene) or censoring it down to PG-13 if you REALLY want to reach an audience, and D) paying them every step of the way for the privilege of letting them screw with you and your work.
But hey, that's not "censorship" or anything, because you're perfectly free to release whatever type of movie you want... in the backwoods of upstate New York in a theater with a seat capacity of twelve. At 12:47AM. On a Wednesday. Provided it's not raining.
Ahh, but you do: The CD-Key. It is now no-longer illegal to have this nifty text file that describes the checksum for WIN95 CD-keys and how to create one.
Actually, yes, that is still quite illegal. Read it again:
(3) Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.
Windows 95 is stored on a CD and requires a PC to run. Last I checked, CDs and PCs are still being manufactured. I haven't checked in the last few milliseconds though, so you could be right. But probably not.
Windows 95 is considered obsolete and unsupported by Microsoft, right? And doesn't that end many questions on MAME?
This ruling merely creates exceptions to the DMCA, i.e. cracking the protection on a work, not distributing it. Therefore, as Windows 95 is a copyrighted work and you don't need to crack its protection to get it to work on a PC (its native format), this ruling does not affect Windows 95 in any way. And the only thing it changes for MAME is that it makes it legal to crack the protection on arcade boards to decrypt and emulate them. It's still illegal to trade abandonware ROMs/ISOs.
the games ARE subdivided into categories by genre.
Maybe you should RTFA again and see that they are subdivided by PLATFORM, not GENRE. "Genre" does not mean "PS2, PC, SNES" or "CONSOLE GAMES--64bit, CONSOLE GAMES--modern". A portion of the Costik list is subdivided by genre, but not all of it. For the most part, it is divided by platform.
Well, you are of course right. It would definitely reduce some of the "freedom" the internet users. But to keep the driving-license analogy, what would happen if no driving license would be needed and driving would generally be without any rules? It would be a similar situation as the one we have now on the internet, there would be some/many people who are rational and intelligent enough to do things right intuitively, but there would also be people who just do not care.
Yeah, they're perfectly similar, except for that pitiful little detail about large numbers of people dying in one side of the comparison and absolutely no one dying on the other. But really... does the fact that worms can't kill anyone and cars do so on a daily basis make them ANY different? I think not. That's just, y'know, semantics. The semantics of people dying.
This is the most foolish idea I've heard in my life. It makes training geriatric space penguins to fly to Mars for us look like a brilliant idea. And space penguins don't even exist.
A more reasonable idea would be to handle worms, which only damage property, in the same manner that we deal with things that, well... damage property. You don't need a license to use matches, but when you start a forest fire because you're too fucking stupid to figure out the arcane science of USING MATCHES, you have to pay for the damage that your forest fire did to the surrounding property and probably incur criminal damages if the fire is serious enough. You also don't need a license to use a baseball or a bat, but when you carelessly make a home run through your neighbor's window and into their China closet, you have to pay for the damages to that, too. So if someone's carelessness causes them to be infected by a worm, why not just have them pay a fine for it, or possibly pay the users that they damaged directly? The RIAA has proven how easy it is to track people down on the internet and sue them, so I don't see why the federal government or a civil lawyer couldn't do the same.
I believe he was referring to "launching counter attacks to clean infected hosts", which sounds less like a honey pot and more like an automated hacking script. At the very least, the description of it would be reason enough for someone to TRY a lawsuit against them if one of their honeypots makes contact with their machine.
Ok, this process of everyone investing their asses in the product may incentivate innovation, but how many wrong investments were made? And now, what MMOG should I play first without having time sinkholes, idiotic admins (problem that is seen also by the linked article - see the highly censored SWG forums), and ton of bugs et al? At least AOL delivered you the packet you wished to retrieve on the internet (yeah, ok, along with SPAM, but this is the problem of the internet in the whole, not of AOL), and 3D cards delivered you pixels arranged to resemble 3d solids on the screen... but after SWG and the other batch of would-be-evercrack, how can we say that these services are delivering FUN?
MMORPGs are currently in the stage that 3D games were during the first few years of the PlayStation. They're definitely going to become a normal part of mainstream gaming in the future, but no one knows exactly how to make them yet. Somewhere, someone is cooking up a Final Fantasy VII or a Metal Gear Solid of an MMORPG , but no one really knows who has it, so they're just taking their best ideas and throwing them into the market to try and see what sticks. Eventually the gameplay will evolve into the sort of naturally refined gameplay that you expect from new 3D action games, first person shooters, 2D side scrollers, and the various other genres of games, but that's going to take awhile.
And personally, I'm going to do exactly what I did with the PlayStation: not sink a single dollar into the damn thing until someone delivers the REAL goods. Eventually, it will happen. Until then, you're paying for the beta test of the hottest MMORPG of late 2006.
It should scare the HELL out of everyone to have this going on. It starts small with things you really don't object to because on the surface they seem to help... so you give up a little freedom for security, then a little more, then a little more, until something happens that you think is going too far then you find out you no longer have a choice in the matter because you gave up your right to decide bit by bit.
But the problem here is that your kids don't HAVE any freedom, nor are they meant to. Parents expect their children to be watched. They watch them at home, they call the places that they're staying at (friends' houses, camp, etc.) to check up on them, and they expect teachers to watch them when they're in school. When it comes to children, almost every parent sacrifices all of their children's freedoms for the sake of security. They want to know where they are at all times and that a responsible adult is taking care of them and making sure that nothing goes wrong.
I don't think it's a clear cut issue of allowing RFIDs, cameras, electronic tagging, etc., but I don't think it's the clear cut Freedom vs. Security issue that you paint it as, either. Children shouldn't be brought up in a society with absolutely no freedom or privacy, but nine years old aren't really meant to have a lot of freedom or privacy, either.
But Nintendo has never marketed themselves as a kiddy console. That's purely a product of the "mature" message board posters. The GameCube has always been marketed as a game console (with none of these extra things) for gamers. No ages. No specific game type. Just good games for gamers that want them.
You've missed my point entirely, mostly because you're sticking to every one of Nintendo's talking points. Regardless of whether you want to call them "kiddie", "family friendly", or even "for gamers", there's a certain universal sameness to most of the games on the GameCube. They're bright, cheery, inoffensive, and devoid of any serious plot. Essentially, their presentation is always in the same genre, even if their gameplay isn't. This turns away the people that don't want to play every single one of their games in the same genre and would like to occasionally play different sorts of games, like horror games, bloody action games, or crime games like Grand Theft Auto. Regardless of your mocking, they are definitely a part of the video game market and I don't think that their demands for a few more bloody, difficult, or plot-heavy games are unreasonable.
And about "none of these extra things"... well, you're just wrong there. Nintendo definitely put an extra thing in the GameCube other than gameplay, but instead of putting in something beneficial to its customers, such as the ability to play DVDs and CDs in their game console without hindering its gameplay in any way, Nintendo decided to put in a proprietary disc drive into the GameCube to cut down on piracy and keep other forms of entertainment that don't give them money from, in their view, tainting their profits. If you think that paying for a console that has been crippled for no other reason than increasing the profits of its parent company is some sort of bonus, then you go ahead and enjoy your purchase, but so far I haven't been thrilled with it.
When we got a console for our kids, we picked GameCube over XBox for because GameCube seemed to have more kid-friendly games, so there is some truth in what he says.
On the other hand, being percived as more mature can't hurt XBox sales in the long run as those kids get older.
And then Sony takes your kids in a couple of years and holds onto them forever because they've chosen not to deal with this "brand identity" crap and allow games that kids (Jak & Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, Sly Cooper), adults (Grand Theft Auto, Devil May Cry, Silent Hill), and even both demographics together (Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, Soul Calibur II) will want.
Both Nintendo and Microsoft have to get away from this brand identity crap and stop being "the kiddie console that also has Resident Evil and Eternal Darkness" and "the adult console that also has Blinx". You can't take the to spot in the market by making people think that your console is either alright for their kids and not for them or alright for them and not their kids.
I think that in a time when movies are getting longer (LotR being filmed as a trilogy, The Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions and Kill Bill being split into two parts), TV shows and anime series on DVD are becoming more popular (roughly 22 and 12 1/2 hours, respectively), miniseries are starting to make a comeback on channels like the Sci-Fi Channel, and all of the games that this person says are too long are at the top of the sales charts, it's fair to say that this guy is in a serious minority. People want visual content that can actually present something a little closer to the depth and quality of storytelling that appears in novels, so TV shows are featuring more arc story lines, movies are being planned from the start as several parts that fit into a larger whole, miniseries are making a minor comeback after being forbidden from North American TV for about a decade, and console RPGs are becoming what they've always wanted to be: beautifully illustrated interactive novels.
Personally, I don't think that console RPGs are long ENOUGH. Suikoden 3 clocked in at 50 hours and felt rushed in the end, Xenogears clocked in at somewhere around 60-70 hours and was EXTREMELY rushed on the second disc, and Final Fantasy Tactics felt a little rushed because it seemed like its developers really wanted to flesh out Delita's side of the story, but didn't have time to.
And to the writer of the article: Welcome to life as a reader. Your complaints are exactly the same as everyone I know whose main hobby is reading novels. And you know what? They wouldn't trade the sort of depth and quality that a longer work can give them for anything else, least of all for a greater quantity of books to claim that they've finished and then feel proud about themselves as they look upon their shelf of conquered books.
Also, if you have so much more money than all of the other gamers I know, all of which have to scrounge for each new $50 title and do a lot of comparison shopping beforehand so they won't get a five hour long lemon of a game, then maybe you should put that extra money to more worthy pursuits than buying games that will rot on your shelf unplayed. Maybe you know a lot of people that can afford way more games than they can play, but I don't, and it gives me the feeling that you don't travel in the same circles as most gamers.
This lawyer is obviously right on the money, because there is plenty of statistical data to back him up. Just do a quick Google search for the sales figures for Grand Theft Auto 3. So far two people have acted violently and blamed GTA and, lo and behold, how many people have bought the game? Two. Obviously, the game automatically makes anyone that plays it extremely violent, because EVERYONE that has played it has become violent.
I just hope that this media publicity doesn't propel Grand Theft Auto series from the bottom of the charts up to, say... the number one game in America each month for over a year. If Mr. Thompson's theory stayed true, then the entire country would collapse into chaos!
The use of focus groups is now widespread and developers are more than happy to use them. "We want I Ninja to be successful and the focus groups gave us a chance to try and find out what people liked and did not like," explains Wayne Binningham, lead artist on I Ninja. Midgley agrees: "Together with Microsoft we used focus groups when developing Kung Fu Chaos as we didn't want to end up creating characters that no-one wanted to play."
I think this article lost most of its credibility with this section. One of the main complaints in several of the reviews for Kung Fu Chaos was that all of the characters were boring, generic characters that no one in the review staff wanted to play. The same complaints have been voiced for I Ninja, who looks like nothing more inspired or interesting than a generic cartoon ninja. Take an '80s action movie ninja, super-deform him, and there you go, you've got I Ninja. How they think that that is an inspired design or that it is somehow anywhere near as unique as a lightning fast blue hedgehog or an Italian plumber that fights evil mushrooms, turtles, and dinosaurs by stomping on them is beyond me.
And I think that what makes a successful character is, quite simply, gameplay. Look at that list on the left there. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Mario, Chun-Li, Sonic, Bomberman, Pikachu... just go through the whole damn thing and try to spot the popular character that was in a game that sucked. Or that was just mediocre. You won't find one, because not only were Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, Street Fighter 2, Sonic the Hedgehog, and all of the others great games, but even the first Tomb Raider wasn't that bad.
People will buy a game that does not suck. They will even buy games that don't suck, but have characters that definitely DO suck, like Ratchet & Clank and Jak & Daxter. They will even buy games that look "kiddie", regardless of what your ridiculous focus group says. If the original I Ninja was "too kiddie" for the focus groups, then what do you think they said about Wind Waker, one of the best selling platformers of the year?
It's not an assumption. Nintendo used to be pretty rigorous. I'm talking 16 bit days (Super Nintendo). Even our own testers never thought to do anything so silly as to hit the reset button 30 times!
I was replying to the part where you said "(and I assume still do)". I'm well aware of Nintendo's nearly flawless quality control in the 16 bit days, as well as the admirable job that they did with the original Gameboy.
ALTHOUGH, you mentioned GAMEBOY games, so it could be that having come out with so many variations of the Gameboy hardware, each of which is back-wards compatible, has perhaps caused problems in across-the-board compatibility. It's one thing to test a game for existing hardware, but then to guarantee it will work on a future hardware revision is quite difficult.
I was talking about GBA games on a GBA SP that were produced after the GBA SP was released in the United States. I could excuse a Gameboy game not working with the GBA, or even a GBA game not working with the Gameboy Player, but a game designed for the GBA SP that has easily reproducible crash bugs on that system is not excusable. Expecting a game designed for the GBA SP to work on the GBA SP is not a ridiculous demand.
Please provide a precise description and reproduction steps that lead to 100% reproduction of the crash. That is what a game tester would have to provide for the programmers to be able to correct it.
I've explained them in this post. Not all of them can be reproduced every single time because some, like the Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo bugs, are merely centered around an AREA of the game (the Street Puzzle menu) instead of an ACTION in the game, but the Yu-Gi-Oh crash bug can be reproduced every time you play the game on every single cartridge. Borrow a copy from someone, find the final unlockable boss (Duke Devlin), and hold him off for a couple of minutes. The game will eventually crash during one of the dice roll animations. You can even reproduce it yourself by putting a dice card in your deck and using it repeatedly. And all you have to do to see that Bandit Keith has corrupted cards is watch closely. He'll occasionally draw three or four cards instead of five when the match loads up, as well as not draw a card during two or three of his Draw Phases during the match. He draws nothing because the card data for his next card is corrupted in some way.
And bear in mind that maybe that game had hundreds of bugs found and fixed, and it had to ship sometime, and well, at some point, maybe they know the game can still crash, but they can't reproduce it at will, it just does sometimes, and maybe nintendo won't find it... You know...
There were probably SNES games where hundreds of bugs were found and fixed, and those games probably DID have to ship sometime, but I still never encountered any crash bugs in any Super Nintendo games, let alone three SNES games IN A ROW, and I played maybe five or six times more SNES games than GBA games so far.
I'm not saying that it's inexcusable for the game to crash once in awhile. It was certainly acceptable in Megaman Battle Network 3, which only crashed a couple of times and in ways that were neither crucial to the game nor reproducible. But even a few small bugs is a serious drop in quality control from Nintendo's nearly flawless SNES testing and very reliable N64 and Gameboy testing. And those Yu-Gi-Oh bugs... they're just inexcusable. That crash bug is the worst bug that I've ever seen in a non-PC game.
Here are the bugs that I was talking about, to be more specific:
Megaman Battle Network 3 Blue - A crash bug occurred only once or twice and they seemed to come out of absolutely nowhere, so I have no idea what set them off. It was a standard GBA crash bug, though. The screen became one single color (blue in this case) and game either went silent or made a horrible noise.
Yu-Gi-Oh Worldwide Edition - The cards that require dice rolls cause the GBA to crash roughly one third or half the time they are used. The final boss, Duke Devlin (Otogi in Japan), uses dice almost every single turn, and usually multiple times per turn. The only way to beat him is to either use cards that prevent him from using Magic or Trap cards or keep playing him until you get really, really lucky and finish him off before the game crashes. There are also several lesser bugs, such as some of Bandit Keith's cards being corrupted, which causes them to appear and disappear at different times, but they're not as blatant as the final boss of the game causing a crash bug every thirty seconds or so.
Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo - Play some of the "Street Puzzle" fights that you need to beat in order to unlock secret characters and costumes. I guarantee that the game will crash several times while completing these. And once you're done with that, mess around awhile in the Goodies menu and watch that crash after awhile, too.
Huh? What do bugs have to do with that? Those games aren't ported for many reasons, none of which include faulty software. Localization, and the perceived fact that some of those CRAZY JAPANESE games just wouldn't sell in this market are the main reasons.
The article that was linked in the/. story was trying to encourage companies like Sony to wield their licensing power for reasons greater than preventing buggy software. All of those games are evidence that Sony is doing exactly that. None of them were rejected because they're "CRAZY JAPANESE games", but rather for reasons of quality. SCEA has a policy of not accepting older 2D games that are not part of a compilation of two or more games, so Metal Slug 3 was rejected and KOF2k was rejected until SNK Neo Geo USA decided to combine KOF2k and KOF2k1 into a single budget game. Goemon and Persona, at least according to Sony, were actually rejected because they were considered to be substandard games, either in terms of gameplay, graphics, sound, etc. I find this believable because it comes from the same SCEA review group that allowed Zettai Zetsumei Toshi (Disaster Report), Ka (Mr. Mosquito), Makai Senki Disgaea (Disgaea: Hour of Darkness) into the US.
Check the GameFAQs FAQ list for the game and go down to "Bug/Glitch FAQ" (GameFAQs doesn't allow direct linking to the FAQs). It explains the Stealth Glitch, which is the one that people started frantically spreading the day after KOTOR came out, but there are several smaller bugs in addition to that one. The bugs generally only occur if you're doing something weird, but that's still a far lower standard of quality control than most console games have had until this year.
Nintendo used to (and I assume still do) pretty rigorous hardware testing, code analysis (since there's certain things such as certain cpu registers you shouldn't access) etc.
Your assumption, as far as I've seen, is false. I've had three GBA games with crash bugs so far - Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo, Megaman Battle Network 3, and Yu-Gi-Oh World Wide Edition, and the Puzzle Fighter and Yu-Gi-Oh bugs not only appeared in casual gameplay, but were easily replicated by both myself and many others. And according to every review I've read of Enter The Matrix, the GameCube version certainly isn't as buggy as the Xbox version, but it's not bug-free either.
For awhile there, console games were relatively bug free. On the Super Nintendo, Genesis, and to some degree the PlayStation, there were very few crippling bugs that every single person that played the game had to watch out for while playing. Lately, this has changed. Enter the Matrix was riddled tons of different bugs. Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness was filled with situations where Lara would get stuck in a jump and you would have to reset. Jak & Daxter had a bug that randomly occurred in the middle of the game that kept you from fully completing it. Knights of the Old Republic's bugs are just as infamous (though not as numerous) as Enter the Matrix's. Star Ocean: Til The End of Time, a best-selling Japanese console RPG, had crippling bugs. Yu-Gi-Oh! World Wide Edition is filled with bugs toward the end of the game, including a relentless crash bug that causes the game to crash during almost any battle with the final boss.
These are some of the best-selling games in their respective countries and consoles, but they're riddled with software bugs and glitches that, in some cases, ruin really great gameplay ideas. And these are just the ones that are popular! Play any of the less popular GBA titles, such as Megaman Battle Network 3 or the GBA port of Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo, and you'll find many more of those GBA crash bugs.
We've actually gotten to the point where games made by veteran game developers like Capcom, Shiny, and Konami that have been certified by NINTENDO (of all companies!) are riddled with crash bugs, so I think gameplay is the least of our worries at this point. If you can't even play the damn game, then the gameplay doesn't really matter much.
(And as a brief side note, some of the practices that the article mentions have already been standard at Sony for years. Sony Computer Entertainment America has wielded its broad monopoly in the United States to keep what it sees as "below average" Japanese PlayStation and PS2 games from entering the US. Some notable victims are The King of Fighters 2000, a Metal Slug title or two, a Persona game, and Goemon.)
I don't know about you guys, but I pay more for my cable connection than for my my phone service (as I'm sure many of you DSL users do). It aint anywhere near free, but it'd be nice to consolidate services.
Maybe you practice a different version of English than I do, but when a new feature is added to something that I'm already paying for with no extra cost added on, the word for that feature is "free".
I looked for it but didn't find Cannon Spike (GunSpike in Japan) for Dreamcast on the list. Megaman is playable as a secret character in this 3-d rendered but mostly 2-D gameplay shooter.
I'm also sort of surprised that they didn't sneak in Megaman.EXE's appearance as a secret playable character in the new Onimusha fighting game Onimusha Buraiden, which could've added a touch of news to the history.
I don't see how any of this is really "gender-bending". I've mostly played male characters anyway, but I've really never seen my male fighter or thief as MYSELF, but rather as my CHARACTER. I would imagine that a lot of the guys that are playing female characters see it the same way. I don't see my characters as being any different from Dante, or Snake, or Ryu, or Moritsune... my MMORPG character is just the male character that I'm controlling. The so-called "gender-bending" male players probably don't see their MMORPG character as any different than Tifa, or Chun-Li, or Samus, or Athena.
Granted, I've heard anecdotal stories about male players experimenting with female characters to trick people or get free stuff from idiots, but I've known a lot of "gender-bending" male players and all of them are just doing the same thing that they've done when they've played as Chun-Li in Street Fighter or Kasumi in King of Fighters - choose a female character because they like them.
This entire article is based on the idea that playing a female character in an MMORPG is the same exact thing as dressing up as a woman and claiming to be one in real life, and from my experience with MMORPGs like Ragnarok Online, that's just way off base. MMORPG or not, most people do not consider their video game character to be a reflection of themselves. What's next, an article telling me that by choosing to play a Warrior in an MMORPG, I'm voicing my insecurities about my physique and fighting ability? Or that the 29% of Everquest players that play as Mages are indicating their desperate need to be the intellectual elite of the world?
Some of this MMORPG analysis just goes way too far.
Its a console. Its not meant to be carried around from room to room or house to house. Who cares if the player is the same size as the gamecube? For stuff like this I'll stick with official devices.
We're talking about the only game console that not only comes with a handle attached, but is also the smaller console out there besides the PSOne and launched with several LCD screen peripherals for mobile gaming. The thing was designed to be more easily portable than any other console and bolting a large peripheral to it on top of the bulk that an LCD screen already adds makes it less portable. It could also make the Cube incompatible with some of the tighter carrying cases out there.
For some people, and by "some people" I mean "Lik-Sang geeks", the portability of the Cube is an issue and this sort of peripheral could be right up their alley.
As much as I like slashdot, as a critical thinker, I have to entirely disregard its claim to be "news" when it is so obviously biased. This is not news, this is propaganda, worse than FOX news at times. Showing MS as a Borg Gates is hardly objective, which ought to be the goal of any self respecting news organization.
Slashdot never claimed to offer balanced or objective coverage, nor to be your One True Source For News. Let's be honest,/. is a dinky little website run by geeks, and because of that it's allowed to make light-hearted jokes, like Borg Gates. It's part of its charm. If you find a site that openly editorializes and doesn't claim to be doing anything different offensive, then you're at the wrong site. And you need to lighten up.
Slashdot Mirror
The statement was true. The MPAA and RIAA for that mater promote 1st amendment rights. They advocate free speech for musicians and movie producers. They aggressively block attempts to sensor what they want to say.
They block attempts by the GOVERNMENT to censor what artists can say, but they willfully censor artists themselves. With the vast majority of the movie theaters in this nation controlled by the MPAA and its standards, any attempt to freely reach an audience requires that you jump through hoops by A) making a movie with the MPAA, B) making sure that its content isn't too controversial to be carried by an MPAA distributor (The Passion is the most recent example of this), C) making sure that it's censored so it won't get an NC-17 rating (like Quentin Tarantino did with Kill Bill and the House of Blue Leaves scene) or censoring it down to PG-13 if you REALLY want to reach an audience, and D) paying them every step of the way for the privilege of letting them screw with you and your work.
But hey, that's not "censorship" or anything, because you're perfectly free to release whatever type of movie you want... in the backwoods of upstate New York in a theater with a seat capacity of twelve. At 12:47AM. On a Wednesday. Provided it's not raining.
Ahh, but you do: The CD-Key. It is now no-longer illegal to have this nifty text file that describes the checksum for WIN95 CD-keys and how to create one.
Actually, yes, that is still quite illegal. Read it again:
(3) Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.
Windows 95 is stored on a CD and requires a PC to run. Last I checked, CDs and PCs are still being manufactured. I haven't checked in the last few milliseconds though, so you could be right. But probably not.
Nope, just checked again. You're still wrong.
Windows 95 is considered obsolete and unsupported by Microsoft, right? And doesn't that end many questions on MAME?
This ruling merely creates exceptions to the DMCA, i.e. cracking the protection on a work, not distributing it. Therefore, as Windows 95 is a copyrighted work and you don't need to crack its protection to get it to work on a PC (its native format), this ruling does not affect Windows 95 in any way. And the only thing it changes for MAME is that it makes it legal to crack the protection on arcade boards to decrypt and emulate them. It's still illegal to trade abandonware ROMs/ISOs.
RTFA!
the games ARE subdivided into categories by genre.
Maybe you should RTFA again and see that they are subdivided by PLATFORM, not GENRE. "Genre" does not mean "PS2, PC, SNES" or "CONSOLE GAMES--64bit, CONSOLE GAMES--modern". A portion of the Costik list is subdivided by genre, but not all of it. For the most part, it is divided by platform.
Well, you are of course right. It would definitely reduce some of the "freedom" the internet users. But to keep the driving-license analogy, what would happen if no driving license would be needed and driving would generally be without any rules? It would be a similar situation as the one we have now on the internet, there would be some/many people who are rational and intelligent enough to do things right intuitively, but there would also be people who just do not care.
Yeah, they're perfectly similar, except for that pitiful little detail about large numbers of people dying in one side of the comparison and absolutely no one dying on the other. But really... does the fact that worms can't kill anyone and cars do so on a daily basis make them ANY different? I think not. That's just, y'know, semantics. The semantics of people dying.
This is the most foolish idea I've heard in my life. It makes training geriatric space penguins to fly to Mars for us look like a brilliant idea. And space penguins don't even exist.
A more reasonable idea would be to handle worms, which only damage property, in the same manner that we deal with things that, well... damage property. You don't need a license to use matches, but when you start a forest fire because you're too fucking stupid to figure out the arcane science of USING MATCHES, you have to pay for the damage that your forest fire did to the surrounding property and probably incur criminal damages if the fire is serious enough. You also don't need a license to use a baseball or a bat, but when you carelessly make a home run through your neighbor's window and into their China closet, you have to pay for the damages to that, too. So if someone's carelessness causes them to be infected by a worm, why not just have them pay a fine for it, or possibly pay the users that they damaged directly? The RIAA has proven how easy it is to track people down on the internet and sue them, so I don't see why the federal government or a civil lawyer couldn't do the same.
I believe he was referring to "launching counter attacks to clean infected hosts", which sounds less like a honey pot and more like an automated hacking script. At the very least, the description of it would be reason enough for someone to TRY a lawsuit against them if one of their honeypots makes contact with their machine.
Ok, this process of everyone investing their asses in the product may incentivate innovation, but how many wrong investments were made? And now, what MMOG should I play first without having time sinkholes, idiotic admins (problem that is seen also by the linked article - see the highly censored SWG forums), and ton of bugs et al? At least AOL delivered you the packet you wished to retrieve on the internet (yeah, ok, along with SPAM, but this is the problem of the internet in the whole, not of AOL), and 3D cards delivered you pixels arranged to resemble 3d solids on the screen... but after SWG and the other batch of would-be-evercrack, how can we say that these services are delivering FUN?
MMORPGs are currently in the stage that 3D games were during the first few years of the PlayStation. They're definitely going to become a normal part of mainstream gaming in the future, but no one knows exactly how to make them yet. Somewhere, someone is cooking up a Final Fantasy VII or a Metal Gear Solid of an MMORPG , but no one really knows who has it, so they're just taking their best ideas and throwing them into the market to try and see what sticks. Eventually the gameplay will evolve into the sort of naturally refined gameplay that you expect from new 3D action games, first person shooters, 2D side scrollers, and the various other genres of games, but that's going to take awhile.
And personally, I'm going to do exactly what I did with the PlayStation: not sink a single dollar into the damn thing until someone delivers the REAL goods. Eventually, it will happen. Until then, you're paying for the beta test of the hottest MMORPG of late 2006.
It should scare the HELL out of everyone to have this going on. It starts small with things you really don't object to because on the surface they seem to help... so you give up a little freedom for security, then a little more, then a little more, until something happens that you think is going too far then you find out you no longer have a choice in the matter because you gave up your right to decide bit by bit.
But the problem here is that your kids don't HAVE any freedom, nor are they meant to. Parents expect their children to be watched. They watch them at home, they call the places that they're staying at (friends' houses, camp, etc.) to check up on them, and they expect teachers to watch them when they're in school. When it comes to children, almost every parent sacrifices all of their children's freedoms for the sake of security. They want to know where they are at all times and that a responsible adult is taking care of them and making sure that nothing goes wrong.
I don't think it's a clear cut issue of allowing RFIDs, cameras, electronic tagging, etc., but I don't think it's the clear cut Freedom vs. Security issue that you paint it as, either. Children shouldn't be brought up in a society with absolutely no freedom or privacy, but nine years old aren't really meant to have a lot of freedom or privacy, either.
But Nintendo has never marketed themselves as a kiddy console. That's purely a product of the "mature" message board posters. The GameCube has always been marketed as a game console (with none of these extra things) for gamers. No ages. No specific game type. Just good games for gamers that want them.
You've missed my point entirely, mostly because you're sticking to every one of Nintendo's talking points. Regardless of whether you want to call them "kiddie", "family friendly", or even "for gamers", there's a certain universal sameness to most of the games on the GameCube. They're bright, cheery, inoffensive, and devoid of any serious plot. Essentially, their presentation is always in the same genre, even if their gameplay isn't. This turns away the people that don't want to play every single one of their games in the same genre and would like to occasionally play different sorts of games, like horror games, bloody action games, or crime games like Grand Theft Auto. Regardless of your mocking, they are definitely a part of the video game market and I don't think that their demands for a few more bloody, difficult, or plot-heavy games are unreasonable.
And about "none of these extra things"... well, you're just wrong there. Nintendo definitely put an extra thing in the GameCube other than gameplay, but instead of putting in something beneficial to its customers, such as the ability to play DVDs and CDs in their game console without hindering its gameplay in any way, Nintendo decided to put in a proprietary disc drive into the GameCube to cut down on piracy and keep other forms of entertainment that don't give them money from, in their view, tainting their profits. If you think that paying for a console that has been crippled for no other reason than increasing the profits of its parent company is some sort of bonus, then you go ahead and enjoy your purchase, but so far I haven't been thrilled with it.
When we got a console for our kids, we picked GameCube over XBox for because GameCube seemed to have more kid-friendly games, so there is some truth in what he says.
On the other hand, being percived as more mature can't hurt XBox sales in the long run as those kids get older.
And then Sony takes your kids in a couple of years and holds onto them forever because they've chosen not to deal with this "brand identity" crap and allow games that kids (Jak & Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, Sly Cooper), adults (Grand Theft Auto, Devil May Cry, Silent Hill), and even both demographics together (Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, Soul Calibur II) will want.
Both Nintendo and Microsoft have to get away from this brand identity crap and stop being "the kiddie console that also has Resident Evil and Eternal Darkness" and "the adult console that also has Blinx". You can't take the to spot in the market by making people think that your console is either alright for their kids and not for them or alright for them and not their kids.
I think that in a time when movies are getting longer (LotR being filmed as a trilogy, The Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions and Kill Bill being split into two parts), TV shows and anime series on DVD are becoming more popular (roughly 22 and 12 1/2 hours, respectively), miniseries are starting to make a comeback on channels like the Sci-Fi Channel, and all of the games that this person says are too long are at the top of the sales charts, it's fair to say that this guy is in a serious minority. People want visual content that can actually present something a little closer to the depth and quality of storytelling that appears in novels, so TV shows are featuring more arc story lines, movies are being planned from the start as several parts that fit into a larger whole, miniseries are making a minor comeback after being forbidden from North American TV for about a decade, and console RPGs are becoming what they've always wanted to be: beautifully illustrated interactive novels.
Personally, I don't think that console RPGs are long ENOUGH. Suikoden 3 clocked in at 50 hours and felt rushed in the end, Xenogears clocked in at somewhere around 60-70 hours and was EXTREMELY rushed on the second disc, and Final Fantasy Tactics felt a little rushed because it seemed like its developers really wanted to flesh out Delita's side of the story, but didn't have time to.
And to the writer of the article: Welcome to life as a reader. Your complaints are exactly the same as everyone I know whose main hobby is reading novels. And you know what? They wouldn't trade the sort of depth and quality that a longer work can give them for anything else, least of all for a greater quantity of books to claim that they've finished and then feel proud about themselves as they look upon their shelf of conquered books.
Also, if you have so much more money than all of the other gamers I know, all of which have to scrounge for each new $50 title and do a lot of comparison shopping beforehand so they won't get a five hour long lemon of a game, then maybe you should put that extra money to more worthy pursuits than buying games that will rot on your shelf unplayed. Maybe you know a lot of people that can afford way more games than they can play, but I don't, and it gives me the feeling that you don't travel in the same circles as most gamers.
This lawyer is obviously right on the money, because there is plenty of statistical data to back him up. Just do a quick Google search for the sales figures for Grand Theft Auto 3. So far two people have acted violently and blamed GTA and, lo and behold, how many people have bought the game? Two. Obviously, the game automatically makes anyone that plays it extremely violent, because EVERYONE that has played it has become violent.
I just hope that this media publicity doesn't propel Grand Theft Auto series from the bottom of the charts up to, say... the number one game in America each month for over a year. If Mr. Thompson's theory stayed true, then the entire country would collapse into chaos!
The use of focus groups is now widespread and developers are more than happy to use them. "We want I Ninja to be successful and the focus groups gave us a chance to try and find out what people liked and did not like," explains Wayne Binningham, lead artist on I Ninja. Midgley agrees: "Together with Microsoft we used focus groups when developing Kung Fu Chaos as we didn't want to end up creating characters that no-one wanted to play."
I think this article lost most of its credibility with this section. One of the main complaints in several of the reviews for Kung Fu Chaos was that all of the characters were boring, generic characters that no one in the review staff wanted to play. The same complaints have been voiced for I Ninja, who looks like nothing more inspired or interesting than a generic cartoon ninja. Take an '80s action movie ninja, super-deform him, and there you go, you've got I Ninja. How they think that that is an inspired design or that it is somehow anywhere near as unique as a lightning fast blue hedgehog or an Italian plumber that fights evil mushrooms, turtles, and dinosaurs by stomping on them is beyond me.
And I think that what makes a successful character is, quite simply, gameplay. Look at that list on the left there. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Mario, Chun-Li, Sonic, Bomberman, Pikachu... just go through the whole damn thing and try to spot the popular character that was in a game that sucked. Or that was just mediocre. You won't find one, because not only were Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, Street Fighter 2, Sonic the Hedgehog, and all of the others great games, but even the first Tomb Raider wasn't that bad.
People will buy a game that does not suck. They will even buy games that don't suck, but have characters that definitely DO suck, like Ratchet & Clank and Jak & Daxter. They will even buy games that look "kiddie", regardless of what your ridiculous focus group says. If the original I Ninja was "too kiddie" for the focus groups, then what do you think they said about Wind Waker, one of the best selling platformers of the year?
It's not an assumption. Nintendo used to be pretty rigorous. I'm talking 16 bit days (Super Nintendo). Even our own testers never thought to do anything so silly as to hit the reset button 30 times!
I was replying to the part where you said "(and I assume still do)". I'm well aware of Nintendo's nearly flawless quality control in the 16 bit days, as well as the admirable job that they did with the original Gameboy.
ALTHOUGH, you mentioned GAMEBOY games, so it could be that having come out with so many variations of the Gameboy hardware, each of which is back-wards compatible, has perhaps caused problems in across-the-board compatibility. It's one thing to test a game for existing hardware, but then to guarantee it will work on a future hardware revision is quite difficult.
I was talking about GBA games on a GBA SP that were produced after the GBA SP was released in the United States. I could excuse a Gameboy game not working with the GBA, or even a GBA game not working with the Gameboy Player, but a game designed for the GBA SP that has easily reproducible crash bugs on that system is not excusable. Expecting a game designed for the GBA SP to work on the GBA SP is not a ridiculous demand.
Please provide a precise description and reproduction steps that lead to 100% reproduction of the crash.
That is what a game tester would have to provide for the programmers to be able to correct it.
I've explained them in this post. Not all of them can be reproduced every single time because some, like the Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo bugs, are merely centered around an AREA of the game (the Street Puzzle menu) instead of an ACTION in the game, but the Yu-Gi-Oh crash bug can be reproduced every time you play the game on every single cartridge. Borrow a copy from someone, find the final unlockable boss (Duke Devlin), and hold him off for a couple of minutes. The game will eventually crash during one of the dice roll animations. You can even reproduce it yourself by putting a dice card in your deck and using it repeatedly. And all you have to do to see that Bandit Keith has corrupted cards is watch closely. He'll occasionally draw three or four cards instead of five when the match loads up, as well as not draw a card during two or three of his Draw Phases during the match. He draws nothing because the card data for his next card is corrupted in some way.
And bear in mind that maybe that game had hundreds of bugs found and fixed, and it had to ship sometime, and well, at some point, maybe they know the game can still crash, but they can't reproduce it at will, it just does sometimes, and maybe nintendo won't find it...
You know...
There were probably SNES games where hundreds of bugs were found and fixed, and those games probably DID have to ship sometime, but I still never encountered any crash bugs in any Super Nintendo games, let alone three SNES games IN A ROW, and I played maybe five or six times more SNES games than GBA games so far.
I'm not saying that it's inexcusable for the game to crash once in awhile. It was certainly acceptable in Megaman Battle Network 3, which only crashed a couple of times and in ways that were neither crucial to the game nor reproducible. But even a few small bugs is a serious drop in quality control from Nintendo's nearly flawless SNES testing and very reliable N64 and Gameboy testing. And those Yu-Gi-Oh bugs... they're just inexcusable. That crash bug is the worst bug that I've ever seen in a non-PC game.
Here are the bugs that I was talking about, to be more specific:
Megaman Battle Network 3 Blue - A crash bug occurred only once or twice and they seemed to come out of absolutely nowhere, so I have no idea what set them off. It was a standard GBA crash bug, though. The screen became one single color (blue in this case) and game either went silent or made a horrible noise.
Yu-Gi-Oh Worldwide Edition - The cards that require dice rolls cause the GBA to crash roughly one third or half the time they are used. The final boss, Duke Devlin (Otogi in Japan), uses dice almost every single turn, and usually multiple times per turn. The only way to beat him is to either use cards that prevent him from using Magic or Trap cards or keep playing him until you get really, really lucky and finish him off before the game crashes. There are also several lesser bugs, such as some of Bandit Keith's cards being corrupted, which causes them to appear and disappear at different times, but they're not as blatant as the final boss of the game causing a crash bug every thirty seconds or so.
Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo - Play some of the "Street Puzzle" fights that you need to beat in order to unlock secret characters and costumes. I guarantee that the game will crash several times while completing these. And once you're done with that, mess around awhile in the Goodies menu and watch that crash after awhile, too.
Huh? What do bugs have to do with that? Those games aren't ported for many reasons, none of which include faulty software. Localization, and the perceived fact that some of those CRAZY JAPANESE games just wouldn't sell in this market are the main reasons.
/. story was trying to encourage companies like Sony to wield their licensing power for reasons greater than preventing buggy software. All of those games are evidence that Sony is doing exactly that. None of them were rejected because they're "CRAZY JAPANESE games", but rather for reasons of quality. SCEA has a policy of not accepting older 2D games that are not part of a compilation of two or more games, so Metal Slug 3 was rejected and KOF2k was rejected until SNK Neo Geo USA decided to combine KOF2k and KOF2k1 into a single budget game. Goemon and Persona, at least according to Sony, were actually rejected because they were considered to be substandard games, either in terms of gameplay, graphics, sound, etc. I find this believable because it comes from the same SCEA review group that allowed Zettai Zetsumei Toshi (Disaster Report), Ka (Mr. Mosquito), Makai Senki Disgaea (Disgaea: Hour of Darkness) into the US.
The article that was linked in the
Check the GameFAQs FAQ list for the game and go down to "Bug/Glitch FAQ" (GameFAQs doesn't allow direct linking to the FAQs). It explains the Stealth Glitch, which is the one that people started frantically spreading the day after KOTOR came out, but there are several smaller bugs in addition to that one. The bugs generally only occur if you're doing something weird, but that's still a far lower standard of quality control than most console games have had until this year.
Nintendo used to (and I assume still do) pretty rigorous hardware testing, code analysis (since there's certain things such as certain cpu registers you shouldn't access) etc.
Your assumption, as far as I've seen, is false. I've had three GBA games with crash bugs so far - Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo, Megaman Battle Network 3, and Yu-Gi-Oh World Wide Edition, and the Puzzle Fighter and Yu-Gi-Oh bugs not only appeared in casual gameplay, but were easily replicated by both myself and many others. And according to every review I've read of Enter The Matrix, the GameCube version certainly isn't as buggy as the Xbox version, but it's not bug-free either.
For awhile there, console games were relatively bug free. On the Super Nintendo, Genesis, and to some degree the PlayStation, there were very few crippling bugs that every single person that played the game had to watch out for while playing. Lately, this has changed. Enter the Matrix was riddled tons of different bugs. Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness was filled with situations where Lara would get stuck in a jump and you would have to reset. Jak & Daxter had a bug that randomly occurred in the middle of the game that kept you from fully completing it. Knights of the Old Republic's bugs are just as infamous (though not as numerous) as Enter the Matrix's. Star Ocean: Til The End of Time, a best-selling Japanese console RPG, had crippling bugs. Yu-Gi-Oh! World Wide Edition is filled with bugs toward the end of the game, including a relentless crash bug that causes the game to crash during almost any battle with the final boss.
These are some of the best-selling games in their respective countries and consoles, but they're riddled with software bugs and glitches that, in some cases, ruin really great gameplay ideas. And these are just the ones that are popular! Play any of the less popular GBA titles, such as Megaman Battle Network 3 or the GBA port of Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo, and you'll find many more of those GBA crash bugs.
We've actually gotten to the point where games made by veteran game developers like Capcom, Shiny, and Konami that have been certified by NINTENDO (of all companies!) are riddled with crash bugs, so I think gameplay is the least of our worries at this point. If you can't even play the damn game, then the gameplay doesn't really matter much.
(And as a brief side note, some of the practices that the article mentions have already been standard at Sony for years. Sony Computer Entertainment America has wielded its broad monopoly in the United States to keep what it sees as "below average" Japanese PlayStation and PS2 games from entering the US. Some notable victims are The King of Fighters 2000, a Metal Slug title or two, a Persona game, and Goemon.)
I don't know about you guys, but I pay more for my cable connection than for my my phone service (as I'm sure many of you DSL users do). It aint anywhere near free, but it'd be nice to consolidate services.
Maybe you practice a different version of English than I do, but when a new feature is added to something that I'm already paying for with no extra cost added on, the word for that feature is "free".
I looked for it but didn't find Cannon Spike (GunSpike in Japan) for Dreamcast on the list. Megaman is playable as a secret character in this 3-d rendered but mostly 2-D gameplay shooter.
I'm also sort of surprised that they didn't sneak in Megaman.EXE's appearance as a secret playable character in the new Onimusha fighting game Onimusha Buraiden, which could've added a touch of news to the history.
I don't see how any of this is really "gender-bending". I've mostly played male characters anyway, but I've really never seen my male fighter or thief as MYSELF, but rather as my CHARACTER. I would imagine that a lot of the guys that are playing female characters see it the same way. I don't see my characters as being any different from Dante, or Snake, or Ryu, or Moritsune... my MMORPG character is just the male character that I'm controlling. The so-called "gender-bending" male players probably don't see their MMORPG character as any different than Tifa, or Chun-Li, or Samus, or Athena.
Granted, I've heard anecdotal stories about male players experimenting with female characters to trick people or get free stuff from idiots, but I've known a lot of "gender-bending" male players and all of them are just doing the same thing that they've done when they've played as Chun-Li in Street Fighter or Kasumi in King of Fighters - choose a female character because they like them.
This entire article is based on the idea that playing a female character in an MMORPG is the same exact thing as dressing up as a woman and claiming to be one in real life, and from my experience with MMORPGs like Ragnarok Online, that's just way off base. MMORPG or not, most people do not consider their video game character to be a reflection of themselves. What's next, an article telling me that by choosing to play a Warrior in an MMORPG, I'm voicing my insecurities about my physique and fighting ability? Or that the 29% of Everquest players that play as Mages are indicating their desperate need to be the intellectual elite of the world?
Some of this MMORPG analysis just goes way too far.
Its a console. Its not meant to be carried around from room to room or house to house. Who cares if the player is the same size as the gamecube? For stuff like this I'll stick with official devices.
We're talking about the only game console that not only comes with a handle attached, but is also the smaller console out there besides the PSOne and launched with several LCD screen peripherals for mobile gaming. The thing was designed to be more easily portable than any other console and bolting a large peripheral to it on top of the bulk that an LCD screen already adds makes it less portable. It could also make the Cube incompatible with some of the tighter carrying cases out there.
For some people, and by "some people" I mean "Lik-Sang geeks", the portability of the Cube is an issue and this sort of peripheral could be right up their alley.
As much as I like slashdot, as a critical thinker, I have to entirely disregard its claim to be "news" when it is so obviously biased. This is not news, this is propaganda, worse than FOX news at times. Showing MS as a Borg Gates is hardly objective, which ought to be the goal of any self respecting news organization.
/. is a dinky little website run by geeks, and because of that it's allowed to make light-hearted jokes, like Borg Gates. It's part of its charm. If you find a site that openly editorializes and doesn't claim to be doing anything different offensive, then you're at the wrong site. And you need to lighten up.
Slashdot never claimed to offer balanced or objective coverage, nor to be your One True Source For News. Let's be honest,