I'm amazed, in the litigious US, that no-one has tried to sue MS for the cost of doing this.
If the US government can't beat their lawyers, WTF are the rest of us supposed to do? Have a priest, a rabbi, and a shaman blessing our lawyer every few minutes until the case is over some time in the summer of 2051?
Maybe I don't watch as much TV as some, but where has the press coverage been in the UK? I haven't noticed any signifigant stories in the papers either. It's almost as if they want the thing to die a quiet death so they can sweep it under the carpet and move on.
Newspapers don't report on every single piece of consumer electronics on the market. They report on the consumer electronics that they think their readers will find interesting, which are usually the ones that have lots of clever features that all work well, a nifty product design, and a lower-than-average or lower-than-expected price. The N-Gage, let's be honest, has NONE of these. Its features do not work well (switching cartridges, adjusting the volume, etc.), its "hold the phone sideways against your head to talk" design is insane, and it costs $300 USD, which is more than a Gameboy Advance SP and a web-enabled cell phone combined.
The only reason that every other piece of gaming hardware is reported on and the N-Gage isn't is because most recent gaming hardware is worth buying. The PS2 is the dominant market leader (and was quite revolutionary when it came out), the GameCube is another well-executed console from Nintendo with very pretty graphics and a few solid games, the Xbox is a leap in graphical power and online play, the Gameboy Advance was a huge leap forward from the Gameboy Pocket Color, and the GBA SP is going to be the only thing on the shelves soon, so it takes on the original GBA's well deserved hype. All of these things are at least as unique and interesting as the other consumer electronics that a newspaper might cover, such as a new settop DVD burner or a new DVR. The N-Gage just isn't. It's in the same league as the overpriced $150 DVD players on the back shelf at Circuit City that just sit there collecting dust while $80 DVD players with more features fly off the shelves.
And it's not as if this is unprecedented. Remember the Nomad? Remember all the press that thing got? Yeah, neither does anybody else.
Yes, any price is apparently too much for some people, and they'll just go on downloading archives of 2000 arcade game ROMs.
Just a quick aside: 2000 games? How can anyone possibly justify downloading the ROMs to 2000 games? We're way out of the realm of casual piracy at that point. That's three new games a day for nearly two freaking years!
It only takes about two seconds to think of the logical reasons behind keeping a collection of 2000 games: 1. Convenience. If you play a lot of MAME games and talk to a lot of other people that enjoy emulated games, someone is eventually going to recommend a game that you don't have. If you don't have to worry about hard drive space or bandwidth, then why not just get the game NOW instead of worrying about Mame.dk or MameFans being down THEN? 2. Redistribution. If someone doesn't have 2000 games and wants to play a certain one, but Mame.dk, MameFans, etc. are down, then you can give it to them. And even if those sites ARE up, you can save them some bandwidth by downloading the entire collection and the trading it out in bits and pieces (or the whole damn thing) instead of both yourself and your friends regularly downloading from them whenever you want a new game. One of the buffers that keeps these sites from going down is the people that downloaded from them proceeding to redistribute the ROMs in other venues, such as AIM and IRC.
This really does change the whole situation for illegal ROM trafficking. Before downloaders were hurting the original copyright owners, but the games were not being sold on the market actively, except through the used hardware market, so many felt it a victimless crime. Now that isn't such a comfortable position, since someone somewhere is making money off selling licenses to own the electronic form of some ROMs.
No, the situation hasn't changed at all. StarROMs is offering a handful of games that aren't even the most popular emulated games out there right now. For the thousands that are playing The King of Fighters '98, Street Fighter Alpha 3, Marvel vs Capcom, or the thousands of less popular arcade ROMS out right now, the situation hasn't changed: the games aren't being sold legally, in stores or otherwise. And for many arcade games, the ports that are being sold in stores right now aren't really worth buying. I love Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo on the GBA, but it's nowhere near as good as the arcade ROM simply because the arcade ROM hasn't crashed on me once, let alone the dozen times that the GBA cart has. So whether a neutered, buggy version of the original title even counts is questionable at best.
This changes the whole situation for illegally trading SOME ATARI ROMs. Not "the whole situation for illegal ROM trafficking".
Those people running StarROMs are getting hurt when you download Asteroids illegally. Furthermore, the dissemination of ROMs over the past years has diminished the potential market for StarROMs. And since Atari gets some money back from the licensing of the ROMs that StarROMs sells, they're losing out on potential revenue here as well. Downloading those ZIP files is no longer as innocent as it seemed.
The only reason that there is an emulator for those games, let alone a market for them and a decade of free publicity from gaming magazine articles about emulators, is "the dissemination of ROMs over the past years". And obviously StarROMs disagrees with you, because this is their opinion from their site:
"StarROMs believes that emulators play an important role in the preservation of classic video games. A portion of StarROMs annual profits will be donated to projects that help support the legal emulation of classic video games."
I don't see legal ROMs as a bad thing and I would certainly consider them if they offered a better product than the pirated stuff by giving me faster downloads and a product that I know is 100% authentic and not a dump of some bootleg cart,
There are less posts on the games posts because you don't see these posts on the main Slashdot front page as default - we realize they may be a little specialized in terms of interest.
They are a little specialized... and keep up the good work, dammit! The quality of Slashdot Games has really surprised me. It's managed to take the sort of specialized, academic game topics that you see on Game Girl Advance and Insert Credit, but with more than two people commenting on it in the comments areas. It's what I've been waiting for for quite awhile.
The reason they don't put variable difficulty settings in certain games is simple: Money. They want to get the games out the door as fast as possible, and it takes extra time to balance out extra difficulty settings. I expect this is particularly important with "first sequels" as they want to ride the crest of the buzz wave of the original.
The problem with this is that I'm talking about games that already HAVE balanced difficulty settings. Devil May Cry and Shinobi both had fairly balanced Hard settings, as well as somewhat balanced difficulty settings that were even harder than that. Devil May Cry 2, supposedly, also had a balanced Hard Mode, but it was only unlockable after you had beaten the game once, at which time your character would be fully stocked with badass weapons and breeze through Hard Mode even faster than Normal. These companies seem to be putting a lot of time into their various difficulty modes, but they don't allow you to choose which one you want to start off with, which inevitably leads to reviews that state that the game is too easy or too hard.
Me, I hated Devil May Cry. But I found out later from friends that the reason I quit (the lava spider - normal difficulty) was, oddly, one of the really difficult bosses. I'm all in favor of ramping up the difficulty as you progress, but making that thing the first boss just put me off the whole thing.
You had to Fucking Love that game to get past that spider. I spent three and a half -- three and a fucking half -- hours fighting that thing. It was terrible decision and it pissed a lot of people off, but kicking that thing's ass felt like Christmas every single time. There was a little glob of Heaven in every splatter of magma blood every time I killed that thing. And the whole, "WTF, it's STILL ALIVE?!?!" moment when it comes screaming down the hallway at you after you've beaten it was just priceless.
And I definitely agree with you on your point about Japanese RPGs, but for completely different reasons. Japanese RPGs aren't easy because you can make them easier by levelling up. They're easy because they're just really, really easy, and you can make them EVEN EASIER by levelling up. I don't think I saw the Game Over screen more than twice in any of the past four Final Fantasy games and I didn't stop to level up even once in any of them. And the situation wasn't much different in Suikoden III, Chrono Cross, Xenogears, Lunar, or any other RPG I've played since the early days of the SNES.
You'd think this same spirit of competition would draw me right into competitive online games like Counter-Strike or Warcraft III. And, to some extent, it does. But for all the hours I've spent playing shooters and real-time strategy games over the years, and despite how authoritative I try to be about these types of games, I know full well that I'm simply nowhere near as good at them as a lot of people are out there. It would be easy for me to make excuses about how I don't have as much time as some people to play Counter-Strike for eight hours a day, or whatever. But I'll admit it straight-up: Even if I did do nothing but play Counter-Strike (or insert_game_here), I'm quite sure I'd never have the skills to be considered a truly competitive player. Which is fine.
This isn't so much a problem with online games as it is with the types of games that are played online. Awhile ago I used to play Garou: Mark of the Wolves, a fighting game for the NeoGeo, on MAME w/Kaillera online. Yeah, I got my ass kicked a lot, but in about a month I was as good as most of the better players on the servers from North America, Europe, and Asia. They kicked my ass, but I learned from the ass kicking that I got. When some guy started really stomping on me with Hotaru Futaba, I picked Hotaru and kept playing against him until I knew the character roughly as well as he did, and my next opponent got royally stomped by my Hotaru.
Warcraft III does not play like this. Warcraft III obscures what the enemy is doing, encourages absolute silence aside from "gl hf" and "gg", and only shows you the absolute crux of the enemy's larger strategy. The only way to learn the game is to either observe games, watch replays, or spend hours being taught by someone. In other words, the absolute WORST way to learn the game is by actually playing it. That's the worst type of online game for anyone but dedicated fans of the genre, but it seems to be the prevailing trend in online games. Counter-Strike, Tribes, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein work pretty much the same way. When someone shoots you in the head from two hundred feet away, you haven't learned anything. You've gotten your ass kicked, but haven't learned from it, and that means you will probably get your ass kicked again in the same way a couple minutes from now because you don't understand the mechanics of your ass-kicking. Again, the game encourages learning the tricks of the game by reading websites and FAQs, observing games, etcetera... everything but playing the game.
These styles of play are completely contrary to the refined genres of multiplayer arcade games. Arcades have fighting games that let you learn from your opponent and dancing games that allow you to see your opponent's physical technique as he kicks your ass, but explicitly restricts games like light gun shooters and four player brawlers (like TMNT or X-Men) to cooperative human vs. computer play. This is because they simply realized that everything that can be multiplayer should be, but that not every type of game is cut out for it. The PC industry hasn't really caught onto that yet, but you can't really blame them when most of the games that are really conducive to competitive multiplayer would require peripherals like gamepads, dance pads, and other things that guarantee that you won't sell more than five copies of your PC game.
I don't understand his point about people acting like assholes online, though. If some thirteen year old typing "0WN3D!!!!!" in Counter-Strike really bothers you that much, I suggest that you find a cave in the woods to hide in, because someone honking their horn at you on the freeway just might give you a heart attack. It's true that there's a certain detachment from natural social behavior when you're online, but for most of us it works both ways. Someone mocking you online isn't like a real person standing next to you harassing you. It's just background noise. It's no different than the sound of cars and people passing by as you play a game of basketball outside. There
I mean seriously, the guy asks a stupid question, the editor even seems to think theres a simple answer. I mean come on people.
Unless of couse the whole thing is just some kind of in joke then of course I feel like a complete idiot for not getting it.
Geeks that run tech sites don't get a lot of opportunities to mention MUDs. By their very nature, they tend not to innovate in very extravagant and news worthy ways, but they're still a lot of fun and many of them are much deeper and fairer than the average MMORPG.
The/. editors needed an excuse to bring up the topic of MUDs. They found an excuse. They used it. Lots of us would do the same in their position, myself included.
In addition to expected tweaking, Itagaki is considering making the game more difficult. "I feel that Japanese gamers are a bunch of wimps. American gamers are more hardcore and I want to make it challenging for you guys," (emphasis mine) he said.
Itagaki isn't the only one saying this. Just look at any interview with anyone from the teams behind Devil May Cry, Shinobi, and other famously hard (or, in my eyes, "appropriately difficult") action games and you will hear the same thing. They get nothing but bitching and moaning from Japanese gamers that have bought their game and feel cheated by the difficulty, even if they include an Easy Mode like Devil May Cry did. However, if they make the default difficulty any easier, the game will be universally shunned by the American gamers that made Devil May Cry a Greatest Hits title and warranted a sequel for Shinobi, which Sega didn't seem to have much confidence in when it was released in Japan.
Why none of them have just put a variable difficulty setting in the Options menu is beyond me. A decision like that would've saved Devil May Cry 2 from becoming a running joke in every English language video game magazine, website, and message board for months now.
Alright, I'll concede that there may actually be some people that ENJOY these cards. I don't really see it as being connected to Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic, or Pokemon, given that these cards aren't actually a competitive game in and of themselves, but as an analogue to baseball cards, I can see the appeal. There's still one sticking point, though:
Here's where you and I disagree! I can turn that around and say that PS2 games offer *no* additional features beyond that $50... whereas some Nintendo games do offer extra features if you're willing to invest in GBAs, eReader cards, etc. It depends where your baseline is... you're saying that Nintendo is underrating their games at the $50 level by holding out features. I'm saying that Nintendo games are fine at the $50 level, and if you choose to spend more, you can get more.
This line of thinking is only acceptable if Nintendo doesn't keep producing games like Wario World, which offered only six or seven hours of gameplay and expected GC-GBA connectivity to bump it up to the play length of the average PS2 platformer. Worse, the GC-GBA connectivity was for downloading demos from Made in Wario, essentially making the game an advertisement for another Nintendo game that you can buy. The Metroid Prime/Fusion bonus was sort of nice and games like Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and Pac-Man are doing something interesting with the GC-GBA connectivity, but I've already seen some GameCube games use the connectivity as a crutch and others simply waste time on it (Sonic Adventure 2 Battle). Some games might be giving you more than your $50 worth when you add in Nintendo's peripherals and other gimmicks, but there are several that aren't.
And regardless, all of these peripherals and cards certainly aren't making the GameCube "easier to use", which Satoru Iwata scolded Sony for simply because the PS2 has a DVD player. They're still spinning their DRM as some sort of feature and claiming that peripherals, regardless of their other merits, make a console easier to use, which is just ridiculous.
I have to say, though, that it's nice to finally see a Nintendo fan that doesn't just screech the company line at me. There's more sense behind some of their strategies than I had expected, especially the cards.
What most people really object to is the capitalism at work here... and that's just because most people are cheap and think they're owned the world just because they paid $30-50 for a game.
I think you're missing my point here, because you apparently think that you're disagreeing with me. I completely agree that people are cheap. They want more for their money. They think that they deserve more for their money and will actively seek what they think they deserve. Sony plays into this, possibly to the detriment of their bottom line, and I think that's part of why they're succeeding. Instead of sacrificing a DVD-ROM drive for a proprietary format that provides better DRM (which I'm sure Sony would've loved love), Sony put a standard DVD-ROM drive in the PS2 and gave its customers the added bonus of using the PS2 as a CD and DVD player. And their games don't constantly remind you that you can get added bonuses in your $50 game by paying for a peripheral, or their handheld system, or a set of cards... you buy the $50 game and that's it. You don't need peripherals, you don't need another Sony system, and you don't need to pay $4 per pack for individual features. With Sony, and to a slightly lesser degree with Microsoft, you get more bang for your buck than you do with Nintendo, but Nintendo tries to spin this as something that makes them "hardcore" or some such because they "only care about the games" (and peripherals? and cards? and GC-GBA cross-promotion?) and everyone still buys it.
As for those who can't believe that data can be held on a card, that's been a common misconception since the eReader was released. I remember people complaining about the NES game cards... saying that the games were already on the eReader emulator and the $5 card packs were a scam. As everybody eventually figured out, the NES games were in fact contained on the cards and not hidden in the eReader itself. Looks like SMB3 is the same, if IGN is correct.
I haven't seen a link that proves this yet and I'll just take your word for it, but this doesn't address whether or not they actually NEEDED the cards. Was there really no memory left on the cartridge? Have they already hit the maximum size of a GBA game in such a short time? And is the system of cards and an eReader really easier to use than a PS2 where you just pop in whatever kind of retail disc you want and it plays?
"Although PS2 was a sales success because it had a DVD player function, it troubled me that we had moved to a hardware where the sole function wasn't playing games" and concluded: "It is imperative that a game machine is easy to use for anyone. I don't agree that multi-function hardware is the only answer."
It amazes me that Nintendo manages to refer to its proprietary disc DRM strategy as some sort of feature year after year and never gets called on it. When you're using a full size DVD-ROM drive for your games, tossing in movie and CD playback is trivial. It takes hardly any resources to add that and certainly doesn't take away from game production/functionality. But when you desperately, desperately want better DRM in your console, you have to make some sacrifices, like added features.
"...because gamers might buy fewer games due to longer play value and a desire to play only software with very high production values."
And the solution that Nintendo has already used for this, of course, is to implement the e-Reader in its GBA games so that you need to pay $4 or so per pack for new cards just to unlock the features that are in the game that you already paid for, like the extra levels in the newest Super Mario Advance game or the special attacks in Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire.
Why do these guys think that giving the customer more bang for their buck is a bad thing? Do they really think that that's the way to defeat the PS2 and PS3, which offer (or will offer) DVD playback, music CD playback, backwards compatibility, games that you don't need to buy peripherals or cards for, and everything else that they can possibly squeeze into your $200 console and $50-$60 games?
The concept for Meridian 59 did not begin with 3DO. A small company called Archetype Interactive conceived the game. "It was a major effort," says Koster, who had developed a name in the MUD creation world and turned down an offer to work on Meridian 59. "For a long time, work on Meridian 59 was distributed over the Internet. People worked remotely. It was a grassroots effort that made good."
I've never quite figured out why the open source movement has never produced anything like this. The dedication to maintaining MUD codebases in the '80s and '90s was pretty incredible, especially since it made it so easy for people to make their own MUDs without serious coding skills. And I would think that making an open source game with half-decent 3D graphics wouldn't be so hard in a time when it seems like every thirteen year old in his basement can make a somewhat enjoyable Half-Life or Quake mod. So why, when so many geeks like RPGs, MMORPGs, and even some of the remaining MUDs, isn't it being done? At the very least, I think a few dedicated programmers and artists could make a graphical equivalent to the old MUD codebases like DikuMUD.
Sure, there's WorldForge, but that project is so ambitious and slowly developed that it should be released on the same day as Duke Nukem Forever. Why hasn't anyone tried anything on a slightly smaller scale?
No, that's not true. We in western Europe have about the same rate of incidende as you in the US (a bit lower actually). And we don't flourinate. Never really have.
This evidence, as well as the entire discussion itself, would be more relevant if I had ever met an American or Canadian that drank tap water. I have never met any such person in my life. Because of fears of water impurities (especially near me) or just the fact that tap water tastes like someone has urinated in your mouth, most people do not drink tap water. They drink bottled water or they just drink juice or soda.
Who cares if most people will wipe their drives? Some might not, and either way some people will find out about the existence of Lindows. I don't think Lindows is betting their company on this move, so there is no need to rip on them for being dumb. If a drive is going to ship, it might as well have something on it by default. And if its going to have something on it, why not Lindows?
Why not Lindows? Perhaps because I don't want my hard drive to contain advertisements in the manual and boot sector for something that I don't want. If I want Lindows, I can get it myself. I don't need it pre-installed just so I can delete it, just like I don't need commercials to fast-forward through on my Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The Simpsons DVDs.
This is nothing but a marketing ploy and it goes against the conventional wisdom that if a consumer is paying for something, he or she should not have to endure commercials on top of it. Granted, it's only on a portion of Seagate's drives, but I'll reserve judgement on that until the next time I go to CompUSA or some such store and see just how much variety there is on their shelves.
If some Vegan on a glacially slow Crosswinds account that can't even proofread his site inbetween making childish MS Paint illustrations say it's true, then it quite simply must be! +5 Informative!
In fact, this site is a wellspring of health information. According to the Vegan Children site, meat is nothing but child poison and milk is not only child poison, but also contains "bovine leukima viruses"! After reading this, I've also come upon the shocking truth that I died at least seventeen years ago and that you are actually reading the typed words of a long decayed child zombie! I would now begin moaning "Braaaaaaains!!! BRAAAAAAAAINS!!!" at you while stumbling menacingly in your direction, but brains are poisonous and evil meat, so instead of I must politely ask for whatever leftover celery or tomatoes you have sitting in your fridge. Preferably evil celery and tomatoes, Tomatoes Of The Dead you might say, but I'll take what I can get.
I don't know if that perceived value will make up completly for the deficiencies, real or imagined, of the Gamecube vs. the Xbox, but it will certainly help.
Well, it's definitely not imagined, since this is a North American price cut and North America is the area where the GameCube is losing ground to the Xbox. It's really no different than the Xbox price cuts in Europe and Japan that aren't being passed on to North America. If the customers in a region aren't buying the console in sufficient numbers, the price is lowered in that region.
What I've always wondered about the Doom series is what is it about the series that appeals to so many people? I admit I haven't given the game a chance, but every time I see an article on Doom or Duke Nukem or several other titles, I always have to wonder what people see in the games. Are they really unique (as in different from other games in the genre instead of being cookie-cutter titles)? Or do they retain popularity because they were unique to begin with and just have a loyal fan base? Am I entirely missing the point?
Besides the nostalgia factor, there's also the fact that Doom is just... a pure gaming experience, I guess you could say. Just like many people prefer Super Metroid over Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow or Megaman Zero, or Time Crisis over Vampire Night or Ninja Assault, Doom just has a purer FPS core than most newer FPS games. Doom has no stealth levels, no plot, no puzzles, no platform jumping, no points where you're stripped of your weapons for the sake of the story... just guns, ammo, and targets that can really fuck you up if you're not careful.
There are also things that Doom got right that have simply been lost in the genre since then. In recent FPS games, the enemies move in one of two distinct ways: they patrol an area or hunt you down. Doom chose neither of these. In Doom, the enemies just wander around wherever they want. Thus, the levels begin to change in structure as you open doors and/or run from enemies. Based on the order in which you open the doors, certainly areas could be relatively calm or complete death traps, and it's so random that you can't even catalogue it well in an FAQ. The result creates much tougher AI than most scripted games.
And I don't know about anyone else, but I haven't seen an FPS in quite awhile with traps as effective or fun as Doom. Return to Castle Wolfenstein had nothing like the ambushes in Doom, which took place in total darkness with an army of zombies coming at you from the ground and imps sniping from above. Those were awesome.
Bad games that force you to wait for the next patch before it's playable. Games with misleading or nonexistent demos. Games that are unplayable due to buggy or draconian copyright protection. Games that just plain don't work with some hardware setups. Lack of an effective rental system. A universal retail store policy of not accepting refunds for opened games, even if they're pathetically defective.
I can't imagine why piracy would run so rampant in such a consumer friendly industry like PC games.
I think the main problem with this article is that it has a "one size fits all" idea of parenting: violent games are wrong for absolutely everyone under the age of 17 and so are violent movies. That's ridiculous. My mother always paid attention to what I was doing and talked to me about everything in my day. My friends' parents were obviously doing the same, because they were constantly having the same conversations when I was in their homes. We all played Doom some time around fourth or fifth grade, we all played every Mortal Kombat game since MK2 daily, we all watched all three Highlander movies way too many times, and we saw R-rated movies almost as often as any other movie.
These movies and video games were not visual heroin. We did not become violent psychopaths obsessed with video games and pipe bomb construction because we played Doom, Mortal Kombat, Metal Gear Solid, or any other violent game before the age of 17, nor because we saw Connor MacLeod cut some guy's head off or The Crow beat the crap out of someone. Our parents talking to us, being informed about what we were doing, and making sure that we could distinguish between fantasy and reality was what ALLOWED us to watch and play these things, not what barred us from it. At the age of fourteen or fifteen, we would've been part of the 70% of kids under 17 that had played Grand Theft Auto III, but we would've been part of it because our parents were paying attention to us and judged our maturity realistically, not because we were neglected, troubled teens that were sawing off shotgun barrels inbetween rounds of Mortal Kombat 2. They knew what the ESRB was as soon as it came out, they held off on Mortal Kombat when we were too young before there even WAS an ESRB, and when we were mature enough, they let us play what they felt was alright for us.
There are parents out there that don't believe that their children magically mature from mentally unstable toddlers to reasonable adults as soon as they hit the "magic age" of 17 or 18. Some would call them bad parents. I would call them sane. I don't understand how people have acquired this idea that what video game or movie companies think is okay or not okay for their children is perfectly accurate, as if the ESRB and its "M" rating knew your child better than you do. Every child matures at a different speed depending on their own intelligence and how well their parents have taught them, not by whether or not they play certain video games, but by actually TALKING to them. That is what good parenting is, not just taking the label on a DVD as some sort of sacred law that you cannot violate. Video games are not something to be put in the same category as drugs, sex, or criminal neglect as Things That Will Definitely Fuck Up Your Kid. You're not a bad parent simply because you violate the Sacred Corporate Law and let your fourteen year old play GTA.
At the Austin Game Conference [gameconference.com] last weekend, John Taylor of Electronic Arts and (previously) Kesmai, among many others, explained that almost the entire profit of the boxed game goes to the publisher, which is often a different entity entirely from the company that runs the actual online service. The profit on the retail box is an incentive for the publisher to distribute the game widely, a necessity for the online service to build its audience./i.
This does not, however, explain why the expansions cost $50 instead of being a part of the subscription model that's downloadable from inside the game. It's not as if Everquest is going to disappear off the shelf without expansions, because Half-Life and StarCraft still haven't and they don't have more than one retail expansion each.
I can understand the need to get the game onto shelves to build an audience and prove that the game isn't some sort of fraud, especially for brand new companies, but that doesn't excuse the use of retail expansions to screw another $50 payment or two out of people that are already paying the $50 retail price plus $120-$180 per year for their subscription.
First up, replace "fully" with "pre" and you'll get a head start on where I'm going. DKC is of no technical merit, nor does it contain any original gameplay. It's a platformer notable only for the fact that rather than being hand-drawn, the sprites, background and sprite animations were rendered on a Silicon Graphics machine. The fact that anyone credits it with extending the lifespan of the SNES is beyond me, especially when some seriously innovative development in the form of the SuperFX in-cart chip actually allowed the SNES to render workable 3D.
Donkey Kong Country introduced pre-rendered 3D graphics to the Super Nintendo and thus shortened the gap between the SNES and the PlayStation. Instead of the difference between the two being "2D versus 3D", it became "beautiful 2D versus ugly, clunky 3D". The PlayStation was all set to be regarded as a huge leap in graphical power until Donkey Kong Country came along and ushered in an brief era of games with beautiful 2D graphics and the sort of refined 2D gameplay that people had come to respect from the SNES, essentially making the two systems six of one and a half dozen of another. Different, but equal.
Without Donkey Kong Country, I really don't think that the Super Nintendo would've lasted until the release of Final Fantasy VII. Games like Donkey Kong Country, its sequels, and Super Mario RPG were what held the PlayStation at bay for all that time, and DKC was obviously their forebear. Also, its sales simply couldn't be denied. The difference in graphical power and variety of gameplay should've kept the SNES from ever having another hit after the PlayStation was released, but instead it released the blockbuster DKC, the nearly-as-successful DKC2, Super Mario RPG, and a few others that I'm sure I'm forgetting about.
I don't think the SuperFX chip was quite as revolutionary simply because the way to preserve the SNES wasn't to do a 3D vs. 3D battle with the 32-bit consoles, but rather to refine and beautify what they already had. I think the games' sales also reflected this, because StarFox was the only truly successful SFX game, but DKC, DKC2, and SMRPG were quite popular.
How can they be developing between 35 and 40 titles? Doesn't it have to be 35, 40, or a number in between? How does Microsoft not know exactly how many games they are developing?
There are two explanations:
1: The PR guy didn't know the exact number, but that it was somewhere in that ballpark.
2: Many games that count as "in development" are actually just in the idea stage and may, like many games in development at every major game company, get cancelled. Capcom recently made the mistake of announcing a lot of games that were in this fetal stage and ended up "canceling" a lot of games that would've gone unheard of beforehand, such as Red Dead Revolver, Dead Phoenix, etc.
Is it just me, or does it seem a bit odd that Atari are charging full price? Surely they'd be able to pass on the savings they're making on the packaging to us. (Good god, what an awful sentence). *shrugs* I guess at least you won't have to deal with the SecuRom problems that some folks have been having. More than likely Atari trying to shaft the consumer again, can anyone spell 'paper-fucking-CD-sleaves'?
That right there is the greatest argument against the digital distribution of retail games. Unless there's a significant drop in price, there's no reason for me to waste my time and bandwidth downloading the game for a few hours and then risk losing my $50 game in a hard drive crash instead of just driving down to Electronics Boutique to get a physical copy of the game. Most gamers that aren't (and don't have) children rarely lose game CDs. You just put them on your shelf and they're there waiting to be reloaded unless you have a fire, which occurs far less frequently than a hard drive crash or worm infection.
Until somebody offers their brand new game over a P2P service for $15 less than Best Buy's and EB's prices for the physical copy, I'm sticking with the physical copy.
You say my data is "just no good" and that yours is unbiased? Sir, I'm filing you under the same mental category as people who say that real unbiased research shows that cigarettes aren't bad for you and that global warming isn't real because the data from those other nineteen out of twenty scientists is "just no good." Much like those people, you're going to just latch onto whatever "researcher" makes an argument that comforts your present behavior and ignore the true body of evidence that points to the contrary, all while conjuring spectres of bias in neutral agencies. Believe what you want. Just don't go poisoning others with your "unbiased" view.
All he's saying is that the statistics that you're quoting are asking the wrong question, which is one of the classic ways to lie with statistics. Asking what percentage of people in cars die out of the total number of vehicular deaths per year is useless, because if SUVs really are safer for their occupants, then the percentage of people dying in normal cars will raise without any increase in actual deaths. As the number of SUV deaths decreased, the number of car deaths would increase, even if the actual number of car deaths has remained stable or even slightly decreased.
The question that you have to ask is how many people have been dying in cars every year in REAL NUMBERS, not percentages. If there is a sudden increase in car deaths at the same point where there is a sudden increase in the number of SUVs on the road, then it stands to reason that the latter caused the former.
It truly annoys me that there are still people who do not know what prison is for, yet they choose to write self-righteous replies pointing out wrong facts. I'll give you a hint: it's called a corrective facility for a reason. The fact is that through our education and social memes we have gotten to believe that prison is for punishment. It is not, and we need to be categorical about this. The fact that people still believe that you are being punished while in prison, let alone that you are in prison so you cannot do more harm is indicative of the ignorance of basic human rights that were that were the object of much fighting in 18th Century France and America.
This is all fine and good, but I don't see video game consoles actually contribute to the rehabilitation of the prisoner. Reading can be done for entertainment, but still improves the literacy of the prisoner and also possibly their general knowledge (if it's nonfiction). While it does do other things, such as being entertaining, it serves as a facet of rehabilitation. Video game consoles, on the other hand, generally don't teach ANYTHING to ANYONE. They serve neither a rehabilitation nor a punishment purpose and are instead just there to have fun. I don't see that as serving the purpose of prison in any way.
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I'm amazed, in the litigious US, that no-one has tried to sue MS for the cost of doing this.
If the US government can't beat their lawyers, WTF are the rest of us supposed to do? Have a priest, a rabbi, and a shaman blessing our lawyer every few minutes until the case is over some time in the summer of 2051?
Maybe I don't watch as much TV as some, but where has the press coverage been in the UK? I haven't noticed any signifigant stories in the papers either. It's almost as if they want the thing to die a quiet death so they can sweep it under the carpet and move on.
Newspapers don't report on every single piece of consumer electronics on the market. They report on the consumer electronics that they think their readers will find interesting, which are usually the ones that have lots of clever features that all work well, a nifty product design, and a lower-than-average or lower-than-expected price. The N-Gage, let's be honest, has NONE of these. Its features do not work well (switching cartridges, adjusting the volume, etc.), its "hold the phone sideways against your head to talk" design is insane, and it costs $300 USD, which is more than a Gameboy Advance SP and a web-enabled cell phone combined.
The only reason that every other piece of gaming hardware is reported on and the N-Gage isn't is because most recent gaming hardware is worth buying. The PS2 is the dominant market leader (and was quite revolutionary when it came out), the GameCube is another well-executed console from Nintendo with very pretty graphics and a few solid games, the Xbox is a leap in graphical power and online play, the Gameboy Advance was a huge leap forward from the Gameboy Pocket Color, and the GBA SP is going to be the only thing on the shelves soon, so it takes on the original GBA's well deserved hype. All of these things are at least as unique and interesting as the other consumer electronics that a newspaper might cover, such as a new settop DVD burner or a new DVR. The N-Gage just isn't. It's in the same league as the overpriced $150 DVD players on the back shelf at Circuit City that just sit there collecting dust while $80 DVD players with more features fly off the shelves.
And it's not as if this is unprecedented. Remember the Nomad? Remember all the press that thing got? Yeah, neither does anybody else.
Yes, any price is apparently too much for some people, and they'll just go on downloading archives of 2000 arcade game ROMs.
Just a quick aside: 2000 games? How can anyone possibly justify downloading the ROMs to 2000 games? We're way out of the realm of casual piracy at that point. That's three new games a day for nearly two freaking years!
It only takes about two seconds to think of the logical reasons behind keeping a collection of 2000 games:
1. Convenience. If you play a lot of MAME games and talk to a lot of other people that enjoy emulated games, someone is eventually going to recommend a game that you don't have. If you don't have to worry about hard drive space or bandwidth, then why not just get the game NOW instead of worrying about Mame.dk or MameFans being down THEN?
2. Redistribution. If someone doesn't have 2000 games and wants to play a certain one, but Mame.dk, MameFans, etc. are down, then you can give it to them. And even if those sites ARE up, you can save them some bandwidth by downloading the entire collection and the trading it out in bits and pieces (or the whole damn thing) instead of both yourself and your friends regularly downloading from them whenever you want a new game. One of the buffers that keeps these sites from going down is the people that downloaded from them proceeding to redistribute the ROMs in other venues, such as AIM and IRC.
This really does change the whole situation for illegal ROM trafficking. Before downloaders were hurting the original copyright owners, but the games were not being sold on the market actively, except through the used hardware market, so many felt it a victimless crime. Now that isn't such a comfortable position, since someone somewhere is making money off selling licenses to own the electronic form of some ROMs.
No, the situation hasn't changed at all. StarROMs is offering a handful of games that aren't even the most popular emulated games out there right now. For the thousands that are playing The King of Fighters '98, Street Fighter Alpha 3, Marvel vs Capcom, or the thousands of less popular arcade ROMS out right now, the situation hasn't changed: the games aren't being sold legally, in stores or otherwise. And for many arcade games, the ports that are being sold in stores right now aren't really worth buying. I love Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo on the GBA, but it's nowhere near as good as the arcade ROM simply because the arcade ROM hasn't crashed on me once, let alone the dozen times that the GBA cart has. So whether a neutered, buggy version of the original title even counts is questionable at best.
This changes the whole situation for illegally trading SOME ATARI ROMs. Not "the whole situation for illegal ROM trafficking".
Those people running StarROMs are getting hurt when you download Asteroids illegally. Furthermore, the dissemination of ROMs over the past years has diminished the potential market for StarROMs. And since Atari gets some money back from the licensing of the ROMs that StarROMs sells, they're losing out on potential revenue here as well. Downloading those ZIP files is no longer as innocent as it seemed.
The only reason that there is an emulator for those games, let alone a market for them and a decade of free publicity from gaming magazine articles about emulators, is "the dissemination of ROMs over the past years". And obviously StarROMs disagrees with you, because this is their opinion from their site:
"StarROMs believes that emulators play an important role in the preservation of classic video games. A portion of StarROMs annual profits will be donated to projects that help support the legal emulation of classic video games."
I don't see legal ROMs as a bad thing and I would certainly consider them if they offered a better product than the pirated stuff by giving me faster downloads and a product that I know is 100% authentic and not a dump of some bootleg cart,
There are less posts on the games posts because you don't see these posts on the main Slashdot front page as default - we realize they may be a little specialized in terms of interest.
They are a little specialized... and keep up the good work, dammit! The quality of Slashdot Games has really surprised me. It's managed to take the sort of specialized, academic game topics that you see on Game Girl Advance and Insert Credit, but with more than two people commenting on it in the comments areas. It's what I've been waiting for for quite awhile.
The reason they don't put variable difficulty settings in certain games is simple: Money. They want to get the games out the door as fast as possible, and it takes extra time to balance out extra difficulty settings. I expect this is particularly important with "first sequels" as they want to ride the crest of the buzz wave of the original.
The problem with this is that I'm talking about games that already HAVE balanced difficulty settings. Devil May Cry and Shinobi both had fairly balanced Hard settings, as well as somewhat balanced difficulty settings that were even harder than that. Devil May Cry 2, supposedly, also had a balanced Hard Mode, but it was only unlockable after you had beaten the game once, at which time your character would be fully stocked with badass weapons and breeze through Hard Mode even faster than Normal. These companies seem to be putting a lot of time into their various difficulty modes, but they don't allow you to choose which one you want to start off with, which inevitably leads to reviews that state that the game is too easy or too hard.
Me, I hated Devil May Cry. But I found out later from friends that the reason I quit (the lava spider - normal difficulty) was, oddly, one of the really difficult bosses. I'm all in favor of ramping up the difficulty as you progress, but making that thing the first boss just put me off the whole thing.
You had to Fucking Love that game to get past that spider. I spent three and a half -- three and a fucking half -- hours fighting that thing. It was terrible decision and it pissed a lot of people off, but kicking that thing's ass felt like Christmas every single time. There was a little glob of Heaven in every splatter of magma blood every time I killed that thing. And the whole, "WTF, it's STILL ALIVE?!?!" moment when it comes screaming down the hallway at you after you've beaten it was just priceless.
And I definitely agree with you on your point about Japanese RPGs, but for completely different reasons. Japanese RPGs aren't easy because you can make them easier by levelling up. They're easy because they're just really, really easy, and you can make them EVEN EASIER by levelling up. I don't think I saw the Game Over screen more than twice in any of the past four Final Fantasy games and I didn't stop to level up even once in any of them. And the situation wasn't much different in Suikoden III, Chrono Cross, Xenogears, Lunar, or any other RPG I've played since the early days of the SNES.
You'd think this same spirit of competition would draw me right into competitive online games like Counter-Strike or Warcraft III. And, to some extent, it does. But for all the hours I've spent playing shooters and real-time strategy games over the years, and despite how authoritative I try to be about these types of games, I know full well that I'm simply nowhere near as good at them as a lot of people are out there. It would be easy for me to make excuses about how I don't have as much time as some people to play Counter-Strike for eight hours a day, or whatever. But I'll admit it straight-up: Even if I did do nothing but play Counter-Strike (or insert_game_here), I'm quite sure I'd never have the skills to be considered a truly competitive player. Which is fine.
This isn't so much a problem with online games as it is with the types of games that are played online. Awhile ago I used to play Garou: Mark of the Wolves, a fighting game for the NeoGeo, on MAME w/Kaillera online. Yeah, I got my ass kicked a lot, but in about a month I was as good as most of the better players on the servers from North America, Europe, and Asia. They kicked my ass, but I learned from the ass kicking that I got. When some guy started really stomping on me with Hotaru Futaba, I picked Hotaru and kept playing against him until I knew the character roughly as well as he did, and my next opponent got royally stomped by my Hotaru.
Warcraft III does not play like this. Warcraft III obscures what the enemy is doing, encourages absolute silence aside from "gl hf" and "gg", and only shows you the absolute crux of the enemy's larger strategy. The only way to learn the game is to either observe games, watch replays, or spend hours being taught by someone. In other words, the absolute WORST way to learn the game is by actually playing it. That's the worst type of online game for anyone but dedicated fans of the genre, but it seems to be the prevailing trend in online games. Counter-Strike, Tribes, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein work pretty much the same way. When someone shoots you in the head from two hundred feet away, you haven't learned anything. You've gotten your ass kicked, but haven't learned from it, and that means you will probably get your ass kicked again in the same way a couple minutes from now because you don't understand the mechanics of your ass-kicking. Again, the game encourages learning the tricks of the game by reading websites and FAQs, observing games, etcetera... everything but playing the game.
These styles of play are completely contrary to the refined genres of multiplayer arcade games. Arcades have fighting games that let you learn from your opponent and dancing games that allow you to see your opponent's physical technique as he kicks your ass, but explicitly restricts games like light gun shooters and four player brawlers (like TMNT or X-Men) to cooperative human vs. computer play. This is because they simply realized that everything that can be multiplayer should be, but that not every type of game is cut out for it. The PC industry hasn't really caught onto that yet, but you can't really blame them when most of the games that are really conducive to competitive multiplayer would require peripherals like gamepads, dance pads, and other things that guarantee that you won't sell more than five copies of your PC game.
I don't understand his point about people acting like assholes online, though. If some thirteen year old typing "0WN3D!!!!!" in Counter-Strike really bothers you that much, I suggest that you find a cave in the woods to hide in, because someone honking their horn at you on the freeway just might give you a heart attack. It's true that there's a certain detachment from natural social behavior when you're online, but for most of us it works both ways. Someone mocking you online isn't like a real person standing next to you harassing you. It's just background noise. It's no different than the sound of cars and people passing by as you play a game of basketball outside. There
I mean seriously, the guy asks a stupid question, the editor even seems to think theres a simple answer. I mean come on people.
/. editors needed an excuse to bring up the topic of MUDs. They found an excuse. They used it. Lots of us would do the same in their position, myself included.
Unless of couse the whole thing is just some kind of in joke then of course I feel like a complete idiot for not getting it.
Geeks that run tech sites don't get a lot of opportunities to mention MUDs. By their very nature, they tend not to innovate in very extravagant and news worthy ways, but they're still a lot of fun and many of them are much deeper and fairer than the average MMORPG.
The
In addition to expected tweaking, Itagaki is considering making the game more difficult. "I feel that Japanese gamers are a bunch of wimps. American gamers are more hardcore and I want to make it challenging for you guys," (emphasis mine) he said.
Itagaki isn't the only one saying this. Just look at any interview with anyone from the teams behind Devil May Cry, Shinobi, and other famously hard (or, in my eyes, "appropriately difficult") action games and you will hear the same thing. They get nothing but bitching and moaning from Japanese gamers that have bought their game and feel cheated by the difficulty, even if they include an Easy Mode like Devil May Cry did. However, if they make the default difficulty any easier, the game will be universally shunned by the American gamers that made Devil May Cry a Greatest Hits title and warranted a sequel for Shinobi, which Sega didn't seem to have much confidence in when it was released in Japan.
Why none of them have just put a variable difficulty setting in the Options menu is beyond me. A decision like that would've saved Devil May Cry 2 from becoming a running joke in every English language video game magazine, website, and message board for months now.
Alright, I'll concede that there may actually be some people that ENJOY these cards. I don't really see it as being connected to Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic, or Pokemon, given that these cards aren't actually a competitive game in and of themselves, but as an analogue to baseball cards, I can see the appeal. There's still one sticking point, though:
Here's where you and I disagree! I can turn that around and say that PS2 games offer *no* additional features beyond that $50... whereas some Nintendo games do offer extra features if you're willing to invest in GBAs, eReader cards, etc. It depends where your baseline is... you're saying that Nintendo is underrating their games at the $50 level by holding out features. I'm saying that Nintendo games are fine at the $50 level, and if you choose to spend more, you can get more.
This line of thinking is only acceptable if Nintendo doesn't keep producing games like Wario World, which offered only six or seven hours of gameplay and expected GC-GBA connectivity to bump it up to the play length of the average PS2 platformer. Worse, the GC-GBA connectivity was for downloading demos from Made in Wario, essentially making the game an advertisement for another Nintendo game that you can buy. The Metroid Prime/Fusion bonus was sort of nice and games like Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and Pac-Man are doing something interesting with the GC-GBA connectivity, but I've already seen some GameCube games use the connectivity as a crutch and others simply waste time on it (Sonic Adventure 2 Battle). Some games might be giving you more than your $50 worth when you add in Nintendo's peripherals and other gimmicks, but there are several that aren't.
And regardless, all of these peripherals and cards certainly aren't making the GameCube "easier to use", which Satoru Iwata scolded Sony for simply because the PS2 has a DVD player. They're still spinning their DRM as some sort of feature and claiming that peripherals, regardless of their other merits, make a console easier to use, which is just ridiculous.
I have to say, though, that it's nice to finally see a Nintendo fan that doesn't just screech the company line at me. There's more sense behind some of their strategies than I had expected, especially the cards.
What most people really object to is the capitalism at work here... and that's just because most people are cheap and think they're owned the world just because they paid $30-50 for a game.
I think you're missing my point here, because you apparently think that you're disagreeing with me. I completely agree that people are cheap. They want more for their money. They think that they deserve more for their money and will actively seek what they think they deserve. Sony plays into this, possibly to the detriment of their bottom line, and I think that's part of why they're succeeding. Instead of sacrificing a DVD-ROM drive for a proprietary format that provides better DRM (which I'm sure Sony would've loved love), Sony put a standard DVD-ROM drive in the PS2 and gave its customers the added bonus of using the PS2 as a CD and DVD player. And their games don't constantly remind you that you can get added bonuses in your $50 game by paying for a peripheral, or their handheld system, or a set of cards... you buy the $50 game and that's it. You don't need peripherals, you don't need another Sony system, and you don't need to pay $4 per pack for individual features. With Sony, and to a slightly lesser degree with Microsoft, you get more bang for your buck than you do with Nintendo, but Nintendo tries to spin this as something that makes them "hardcore" or some such because they "only care about the games" (and peripherals? and cards? and GC-GBA cross-promotion?) and everyone still buys it.
As for those who can't believe that data can be held on a card, that's been a common misconception since the eReader was released. I remember people complaining about the NES game cards... saying that the games were already on the eReader emulator and the $5 card packs were a scam. As everybody eventually figured out, the NES games were in fact contained on the cards and not hidden in the eReader itself. Looks like SMB3 is the same, if IGN is correct.
I haven't seen a link that proves this yet and I'll just take your word for it, but this doesn't address whether or not they actually NEEDED the cards. Was there really no memory left on the cartridge? Have they already hit the maximum size of a GBA game in such a short time? And is the system of cards and an eReader really easier to use than a PS2 where you just pop in whatever kind of retail disc you want and it plays?
"Although PS2 was a sales success because it had a DVD player function, it troubled me that we had moved to a hardware where the sole function wasn't playing games" and concluded: "It is imperative that a game machine is easy to use for anyone. I don't agree that multi-function hardware is the only answer."
It amazes me that Nintendo manages to refer to its proprietary disc DRM strategy as some sort of feature year after year and never gets called on it. When you're using a full size DVD-ROM drive for your games, tossing in movie and CD playback is trivial. It takes hardly any resources to add that and certainly doesn't take away from game production/functionality. But when you desperately, desperately want better DRM in your console, you have to make some sacrifices, like added features.
"...because gamers might buy fewer games due to longer play value and a desire to play only software with very high production values."
And the solution that Nintendo has already used for this, of course, is to implement the e-Reader in its GBA games so that you need to pay $4 or so per pack for new cards just to unlock the features that are in the game that you already paid for, like the extra levels in the newest Super Mario Advance game or the special attacks in Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire.
Why do these guys think that giving the customer more bang for their buck is a bad thing? Do they really think that that's the way to defeat the PS2 and PS3, which offer (or will offer) DVD playback, music CD playback, backwards compatibility, games that you don't need to buy peripherals or cards for, and everything else that they can possibly squeeze into your $200 console and $50-$60 games?
The concept for Meridian 59 did not begin with 3DO. A small company called Archetype Interactive conceived the game. "It was a major effort," says Koster, who had developed a name in the MUD creation world and turned down an offer to work on Meridian 59. "For a long time, work on Meridian 59 was distributed over the Internet. People worked remotely. It was a grassroots effort that made good."
I've never quite figured out why the open source movement has never produced anything like this. The dedication to maintaining MUD codebases in the '80s and '90s was pretty incredible, especially since it made it so easy for people to make their own MUDs without serious coding skills. And I would think that making an open source game with half-decent 3D graphics wouldn't be so hard in a time when it seems like every thirteen year old in his basement can make a somewhat enjoyable Half-Life or Quake mod. So why, when so many geeks like RPGs, MMORPGs, and even some of the remaining MUDs, isn't it being done? At the very least, I think a few dedicated programmers and artists could make a graphical equivalent to the old MUD codebases like DikuMUD.
Sure, there's WorldForge, but that project is so ambitious and slowly developed that it should be released on the same day as Duke Nukem Forever. Why hasn't anyone tried anything on a slightly smaller scale?
No, that's not true. We in western Europe have about the same rate of incidende as you in the US (a bit lower actually). And we don't flourinate. Never really have.
This evidence, as well as the entire discussion itself, would be more relevant if I had ever met an American or Canadian that drank tap water. I have never met any such person in my life. Because of fears of water impurities (especially near me) or just the fact that tap water tastes like someone has urinated in your mouth, most people do not drink tap water. They drink bottled water or they just drink juice or soda.
Who cares if most people will wipe their drives? Some might not, and either way some people will find out about the existence of Lindows. I don't think Lindows is betting their company on this move, so there is no need to rip on them for being dumb. If a drive is going to ship, it might as well have something on it by default. And if its going to have something on it, why not Lindows?
Why not Lindows? Perhaps because I don't want my hard drive to contain advertisements in the manual and boot sector for something that I don't want. If I want Lindows, I can get it myself. I don't need it pre-installed just so I can delete it, just like I don't need commercials to fast-forward through on my Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The Simpsons DVDs.
This is nothing but a marketing ploy and it goes against the conventional wisdom that if a consumer is paying for something, he or she should not have to endure commercials on top of it. Granted, it's only on a portion of Seagate's drives, but I'll reserve judgement on that until the next time I go to CompUSA or some such store and see just how much variety there is on their shelves.
If some Vegan on a glacially slow Crosswinds account that can't even proofread his site inbetween making childish MS Paint illustrations say it's true, then it quite simply must be! +5 Informative!
In fact, this site is a wellspring of health information. According to the Vegan Children site, meat is nothing but child poison and milk is not only child poison, but also contains "bovine leukima viruses"! After reading this, I've also come upon the shocking truth that I died at least seventeen years ago and that you are actually reading the typed words of a long decayed child zombie! I would now begin moaning "Braaaaaaains!!! BRAAAAAAAAINS!!!" at you while stumbling menacingly in your direction, but brains are poisonous and evil meat, so instead of I must politely ask for whatever leftover celery or tomatoes you have sitting in your fridge. Preferably evil celery and tomatoes, Tomatoes Of The Dead you might say, but I'll take what I can get.
I don't know if that perceived value will make up completly for the deficiencies, real or imagined, of the Gamecube vs. the Xbox, but it will certainly help.
Well, it's definitely not imagined, since this is a North American price cut and North America is the area where the GameCube is losing ground to the Xbox. It's really no different than the Xbox price cuts in Europe and Japan that aren't being passed on to North America. If the customers in a region aren't buying the console in sufficient numbers, the price is lowered in that region.
What I've always wondered about the Doom series is what is it about the series that appeals to so many people? I admit I haven't given the game a chance, but every time I see an article on Doom or Duke Nukem or several other titles, I always have to wonder what people see in the games. Are they really unique (as in different from other games in the genre instead of being cookie-cutter titles)? Or do they retain popularity because they were unique to begin with and just have a loyal fan base? Am I entirely missing the point?
Besides the nostalgia factor, there's also the fact that Doom is just... a pure gaming experience, I guess you could say. Just like many people prefer Super Metroid over Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow or Megaman Zero, or Time Crisis over Vampire Night or Ninja Assault, Doom just has a purer FPS core than most newer FPS games. Doom has no stealth levels, no plot, no puzzles, no platform jumping, no points where you're stripped of your weapons for the sake of the story... just guns, ammo, and targets that can really fuck you up if you're not careful.
There are also things that Doom got right that have simply been lost in the genre since then. In recent FPS games, the enemies move in one of two distinct ways: they patrol an area or hunt you down. Doom chose neither of these. In Doom, the enemies just wander around wherever they want. Thus, the levels begin to change in structure as you open doors and/or run from enemies. Based on the order in which you open the doors, certainly areas could be relatively calm or complete death traps, and it's so random that you can't even catalogue it well in an FAQ. The result creates much tougher AI than most scripted games.
And I don't know about anyone else, but I haven't seen an FPS in quite awhile with traps as effective or fun as Doom. Return to Castle Wolfenstein had nothing like the ambushes in Doom, which took place in total darkness with an army of zombies coming at you from the ground and imps sniping from above. Those were awesome.
Bad games that force you to wait for the next patch before it's playable. Games with misleading or nonexistent demos. Games that are unplayable due to buggy or draconian copyright protection. Games that just plain don't work with some hardware setups. Lack of an effective rental system. A universal retail store policy of not accepting refunds for opened games, even if they're pathetically defective.
I can't imagine why piracy would run so rampant in such a consumer friendly industry like PC games.
I think the main problem with this article is that it has a "one size fits all" idea of parenting: violent games are wrong for absolutely everyone under the age of 17 and so are violent movies. That's ridiculous. My mother always paid attention to what I was doing and talked to me about everything in my day. My friends' parents were obviously doing the same, because they were constantly having the same conversations when I was in their homes. We all played Doom some time around fourth or fifth grade, we all played every Mortal Kombat game since MK2 daily, we all watched all three Highlander movies way too many times, and we saw R-rated movies almost as often as any other movie.
These movies and video games were not visual heroin. We did not become violent psychopaths obsessed with video games and pipe bomb construction because we played Doom, Mortal Kombat, Metal Gear Solid, or any other violent game before the age of 17, nor because we saw Connor MacLeod cut some guy's head off or The Crow beat the crap out of someone. Our parents talking to us, being informed about what we were doing, and making sure that we could distinguish between fantasy and reality was what ALLOWED us to watch and play these things, not what barred us from it. At the age of fourteen or fifteen, we would've been part of the 70% of kids under 17 that had played Grand Theft Auto III, but we would've been part of it because our parents were paying attention to us and judged our maturity realistically, not because we were neglected, troubled teens that were sawing off shotgun barrels inbetween rounds of Mortal Kombat 2. They knew what the ESRB was as soon as it came out, they held off on Mortal Kombat when we were too young before there even WAS an ESRB, and when we were mature enough, they let us play what they felt was alright for us.
There are parents out there that don't believe that their children magically mature from mentally unstable toddlers to reasonable adults as soon as they hit the "magic age" of 17 or 18. Some would call them bad parents. I would call them sane. I don't understand how people have acquired this idea that what video game or movie companies think is okay or not okay for their children is perfectly accurate, as if the ESRB and its "M" rating knew your child better than you do. Every child matures at a different speed depending on their own intelligence and how well their parents have taught them, not by whether or not they play certain video games, but by actually TALKING to them. That is what good parenting is, not just taking the label on a DVD as some sort of sacred law that you cannot violate. Video games are not something to be put in the same category as drugs, sex, or criminal neglect as Things That Will Definitely Fuck Up Your Kid. You're not a bad parent simply because you violate the Sacred Corporate Law and let your fourteen year old play GTA.
At the Austin Game Conference [gameconference.com] last weekend, John Taylor of Electronic Arts and (previously) Kesmai, among many others, explained that almost the entire profit of the boxed game goes to the publisher, which is often a different entity entirely from the company that runs the actual online service. The profit on the retail box is an incentive for the publisher to distribute the game widely, a necessity for the online service to build its audience./i.
This does not, however, explain why the expansions cost $50 instead of being a part of the subscription model that's downloadable from inside the game. It's not as if Everquest is going to disappear off the shelf without expansions, because Half-Life and StarCraft still haven't and they don't have more than one retail expansion each.
I can understand the need to get the game onto shelves to build an audience and prove that the game isn't some sort of fraud, especially for brand new companies, but that doesn't excuse the use of retail expansions to screw another $50 payment or two out of people that are already paying the $50 retail price plus $120-$180 per year for their subscription.
First up, replace "fully" with "pre" and you'll get a head start on where I'm going. DKC is of no technical merit, nor does it contain any original gameplay. It's a platformer notable only for the fact that rather than being hand-drawn, the sprites, background and sprite animations were rendered on a Silicon Graphics machine. The fact that anyone credits it with extending the lifespan of the SNES is beyond me, especially when some seriously innovative development in the form of the SuperFX in-cart chip actually allowed the SNES to render workable 3D.
Donkey Kong Country introduced pre-rendered 3D graphics to the Super Nintendo and thus shortened the gap between the SNES and the PlayStation. Instead of the difference between the two being "2D versus 3D", it became "beautiful 2D versus ugly, clunky 3D". The PlayStation was all set to be regarded as a huge leap in graphical power until Donkey Kong Country came along and ushered in an brief era of games with beautiful 2D graphics and the sort of refined 2D gameplay that people had come to respect from the SNES, essentially making the two systems six of one and a half dozen of another. Different, but equal.
Without Donkey Kong Country, I really don't think that the Super Nintendo would've lasted until the release of Final Fantasy VII. Games like Donkey Kong Country, its sequels, and Super Mario RPG were what held the PlayStation at bay for all that time, and DKC was obviously their forebear. Also, its sales simply couldn't be denied. The difference in graphical power and variety of gameplay should've kept the SNES from ever having another hit after the PlayStation was released, but instead it released the blockbuster DKC, the nearly-as-successful DKC2, Super Mario RPG, and a few others that I'm sure I'm forgetting about.
I don't think the SuperFX chip was quite as revolutionary simply because the way to preserve the SNES wasn't to do a 3D vs. 3D battle with the 32-bit consoles, but rather to refine and beautify what they already had. I think the games' sales also reflected this, because StarFox was the only truly successful SFX game, but DKC, DKC2, and SMRPG were quite popular.
How can they be developing between 35 and 40 titles? Doesn't it have to be 35, 40, or a number in between? How does Microsoft not know exactly how many games they are developing?
There are two explanations:
1: The PR guy didn't know the exact number, but that it was somewhere in that ballpark.
2: Many games that count as "in development" are actually just in the idea stage and may, like many games in development at every major game company, get cancelled. Capcom recently made the mistake of announcing a lot of games that were in this fetal stage and ended up "canceling" a lot of games that would've gone unheard of beforehand, such as Red Dead Revolver, Dead Phoenix, etc.
Is it just me, or does it seem a bit odd that Atari are charging full price? Surely they'd be able to pass on the savings they're making on the packaging to us. (Good god, what an awful sentence). *shrugs* I guess at least you won't have to deal with the SecuRom problems that some folks have been having. More than likely Atari trying to shaft the consumer again, can anyone spell 'paper-fucking-CD-sleaves'?
That right there is the greatest argument against the digital distribution of retail games. Unless there's a significant drop in price, there's no reason for me to waste my time and bandwidth downloading the game for a few hours and then risk losing my $50 game in a hard drive crash instead of just driving down to Electronics Boutique to get a physical copy of the game. Most gamers that aren't (and don't have) children rarely lose game CDs. You just put them on your shelf and they're there waiting to be reloaded unless you have a fire, which occurs far less frequently than a hard drive crash or worm infection.
Until somebody offers their brand new game over a P2P service for $15 less than Best Buy's and EB's prices for the physical copy, I'm sticking with the physical copy.
You say my data is "just no good" and that yours is unbiased? Sir, I'm filing you under the same mental category as people who say that real unbiased research shows that cigarettes aren't bad for you and that global warming isn't real because the data from those other nineteen out of twenty scientists is "just no good." Much like those people, you're going to just latch onto whatever "researcher" makes an argument that comforts your present behavior and ignore the true body of evidence that points to the contrary, all while conjuring spectres of bias in neutral agencies. Believe what you want. Just don't go poisoning others with your "unbiased" view.
All he's saying is that the statistics that you're quoting are asking the wrong question, which is one of the classic ways to lie with statistics. Asking what percentage of people in cars die out of the total number of vehicular deaths per year is useless, because if SUVs really are safer for their occupants, then the percentage of people dying in normal cars will raise without any increase in actual deaths. As the number of SUV deaths decreased, the number of car deaths would increase, even if the actual number of car deaths has remained stable or even slightly decreased.
The question that you have to ask is how many people have been dying in cars every year in REAL NUMBERS, not percentages. If there is a sudden increase in car deaths at the same point where there is a sudden increase in the number of SUVs on the road, then it stands to reason that the latter caused the former.
It truly annoys me that there are still people who do not know what prison is for, yet they choose to write self-righteous replies pointing out wrong facts. I'll give you a hint: it's called a corrective facility for a reason. The fact is that through our education and social memes we have gotten to believe that prison is for punishment. It is not, and we need to be categorical about this. The fact that people still believe that you are being punished while in prison, let alone that you are in prison so you cannot do more harm is indicative of the ignorance of basic human rights that were that were the object of much fighting in 18th Century France and America.
This is all fine and good, but I don't see video game consoles actually contribute to the rehabilitation of the prisoner. Reading can be done for entertainment, but still improves the literacy of the prisoner and also possibly their general knowledge (if it's nonfiction). While it does do other things, such as being entertaining, it serves as a facet of rehabilitation. Video game consoles, on the other hand, generally don't teach ANYTHING to ANYONE. They serve neither a rehabilitation nor a punishment purpose and are instead just there to have fun. I don't see that as serving the purpose of prison in any way.