"Hiroshima is gorgeous. It's not a crater and not a radioactive wasteland."
So the city still thrives. Besides the dome, are there areas that are left as they were after the blast?
Ugh I get such an awful feeling discussing this topic. Whatever problems we had with the Japanese in WW2, it's so difficult to imagine celebrating a moment like that today, even though I realize it marked a turning point in a brutal war.
Sorry for the run-on sentence there, I'm just rather fond of Japan.
"How can Nintendo make such a poor decision? Don't the Japanese hear stories of how hellish AOL's connection speeds and busy signal rates are?"
Nintendo has stated before that they won't do on-line until they can make it reasonable for the player. They don't feel that a per month subscription is a good idea. AOL's big enough (and available enough) that they can probably work out a close to free approach. Maybe paid for advertising or something?
I didn't immediately balk at this story. An alternative provider doesn't immediately pop into mind. Remember that Nintendo's not after the niche audience here.
"I have nothing to actually own up to in the slightest."
You came in and posted something you knew would draw fire.
"I knew that I would get this type of response, though - it happens every time I see someone start critisising Nintendo games. Within 3 or 4 posts, the Nintendo camp starts saying that the other person doesn't know what they are talking about."
Incidentally, that is flamebait. If you had taken a more PC approach to your views, you might have had much less resistance to your claims. You knew better but you went on anyway.
"Incorrect, SMS is painfully similar to Mario 64 - many reviews have stated it, and even Nintendo themselves admitted that SMS was not up to scratch."
I felt that way in the beginning of the game. About a quarter of the way in or so the game really flourished. I found myself really challenged, as opposed to thinking about what to do to trigger whatever it was I wanted. SM64 felt so.. oh I dunno.. linear? Confined? With the pump and the the coins skittered about, the game became much more about exploration and having fun than 64 was. Gotta defend it here. The pump was much more than a simple addition, it turned the game on its side.
I'm not so quick to jump on board with whatever reviews you read. Those guys have to play that game and beat it before its lauched. They don't sit down and take the time to just enjoy the game and have fun, they're trying to get to the end. Anything can seem painfully repetitive in that concetrated of state.
"If you think that stating SMS is similar to Mario 64 is flamebait, then you do not actually know what flamebait is. Are you saying that everyone who stated so in a review is a troll, didn't understand the game or doesn't know what they are talking about?"
Don't get bitchy at me, I'm not attacking you. It wasn't that you compared the two games, it was the way you presented it. It didn't help that you said something along the lines of "well it has those characters therefore the games are similar". I don't remember your exact wording, but that's definitely how that was interpreted. Back in the 16-bit days, there was a thick line drawn between the SNES and the Genesis. You had the Sonic the Hedgehog people and the Mario people. Often each side never played the games of the other side. With this lack of information, a war grew. One of the complaints from the Sonic side was that there were so many Mario games. But the Mario boys knew something the Sonic boys didn't, the Mario games were vastly different from each other. Sonic, though, didn't change a whole lot. I guess you could relate it to the GTA -- GTA2 argument you made in another post. Nintendo fans have had to put up with this ill-informed bullshit for years. I'm not surprised AnonV's said what he has said, but I can't say I totally blame him. if you had altered your original post a bit, you wouldn't have had this problem.
Again, don't get shitty with me here. I'm not defending SMS to its death, I just happened to like it. You don't need to jump my ass over it.
"What you are saying is like someone trying to claim that GTA2 is vastly different to GTA."
No, not really. GTA -- GTA2 was not much more than a level upgrade. On the other hand, I wouldn't say Mario 64 to SMS would be the same as comparing GTA to GTA 3.
For the record, when I first started playing SMS I felt exactly the way you did. It wasn't until I got a few levels deep that I found the real charm of the game. If AnonV had the same experience I did, I could understand why he's saying you haven't played it. I'd suspect it myself. On the other hand, if I were hellbent on hating the game anyway, I'm not sure there's much it could do to convince me. I'm that way with Matrix Reloaded.
"No, the case is that as usual Nintendo fans cannot bear the critisism."
In general, that may or may not be true. In this case, though, you made a really stupid comment. If I were you, I'd own up to that instead of trying to pass the blame off on Nintendo enthusiasm.
AnonV was absolutely correct that your comment likening Super Mario Sunshine to Mario 64 was disputable. One would really have to oversimplify to say they're the same. I have a feeling that's how you hit is hot button. I don't think he's bothered that you're criticizing Nintendo, I think he's bothered that you got modded as insightful/interesting over a comment that'd only ring true with people who haven't played the game.
As I said before, you really should just own up to what you said and move on. You two will never agree. Unfortunately for you, the facts of the matter are not on your side. One could launch reason after reason after reason why SMS is different from Mario 64, you'll still flush it all because you're mad at Nintendo for not satisfying you. The GameCube and the Mario games may not be what you want anymore, doesn't mean that Nintendo did anything wrong. With that in mind, do you really want to carry on with this petty argument?
Just own up. Blaming everybody else for your flamebait comment isn't going to end in a positive resolution.
"You say that you are a CG artist, huh? Could you have done that scene better?"
It was a team effort. Saying yes would make me sound conceited, saying no would make you think you've won your point. Never mind how good or bad I am, I can still see the flaws in it.
"Somehow, I seriously doubt it. If you could create something that even looked half as good, you'd be a millionaire. "
CG artists are not millionaires. The individuals that worked on that scene, even if you put their salaries together, are not millionaires.
Sorry you didn't like me badmouthing that horrible movie.
No, it has become uncool to defend a movie that sucked so badly. We want Hollywood to make good movies.
"Referring to the first Matrix's bullet time techniques as being "the same" as what's going on here makes no sense, since they're two totally different means of achieving that type of camera style."
They're not that dissimilar. In the bullet time technique, they used photographs mapped to a 3d mesh to generate the background. This was done in multiple scenes. The difference with MR was that the characters were CG rendered like the background, instead of just photographed. Unfortunately, the photo technique was more convincing.
"Given the stills that were shown during that SIGGRAPH presentation, which, incidentally, had side-by-side comparisons of the real and virtual actors shot under controlled lighting conditions, there's basically one thing that gives the digital doubles away--somehow, I doubt people were checking the shape of the back of Agent Smith's head during the Burly Brawl."
Hardly conclusive. People aren't imagining that they saw something strange there. The stills might have looked right, afterall the geometry and textures were scanned as opposed to built by hand. There were still errors there on the screen. The black suits were no longer black, they were gray, and something about the shading gave away that it was CG rendered. In terms of motion, they definitely did not look natural. I'm not sure if this was because they used a mo-cap performer that acted nothing like the guy who plays Agent Smith, or if it's because a lot of it was manually keyframed. Either way, something was still wrong about it. And, to top it all of, the choreography was ridiculous. You see, there's a rule you MUST follow when you create a kung-fu movie. If the bad guy gets hit, he falls down. Neo gets up on his pole and starts running in circles stepping on everybody's face, and somehow manages to get good speed here. Can anybody honestly tell me this would ever work?
The technology may have been there, but the ball was dropped in so many places.
"I guess now I chalk a lot of this up to inability to completely suspend belief when I'm watching scenes that I know are physically impossible to shoot."
Nope. Wouldn't recommend that. I think if more time was put into that scene, a lot of the bitching about it would die down. Besides, I don't remember the Two Towers causing this kind of bitching.
"Also, some of those Burly Brawl shots are just head replacements, so look for those Agent Smiths that don't quite have the right face and then come back and tell me that all those CG bodies look fake."
It looked fake. The sooner you own up to that the sooner you can move on. I'm a CG artist myself. I know what went on in this movie. They had plenty of time to know that it was going to cause people to go "What the fuck?!"
"Now, switch to Matrix Reloaded. You now have a totally different technique where something can happen that simply doesn't map to the real world at all. You go through the first part of the first movie's "bullet-time" process, filming real-world elements as required, and establishing your camera and timing tracks. Then you switch to 100% CG, for elements (e.g. Neo swooping in to pick up Morpheus and the Keymaker) that could never be fillmed, even against a green-screen with wires. The CG is based on the footage that you have, and uses textures, 3D-location information and other details that you have extracted, but ultimately it's the CG equivalent of rotoscoping."
Nope, the effect's still not all that different from the original movie. In the 'bullet-time' effects, the background was completely CG rendered using photos from the set. The only real difference was that they didn't build the character himself in 3D as well. They basically took the effect from the first movie and introduced animated characters as well as settings. We're not talking a really huge leap here. Pity that the CG effects in MR were less effective in convincing the audience than in the Matrix.
"You're comparing real-world composites to computer generated images and saying that they didn't look as natural, without actually realizing that you're looking at nothing more than a drawing! That's perhaps one of the most important benchmarks in modern computer graphics that I can imagine!"
I'm not sure I understood this comment. Are you referring to the virtual state these guys live in inside the Matrix? If not, clarify?
"If you look at any scene in that movie with those ideas as your lens, it starts to make a lot more sense, and you start to see just how devious the third movie can get...."
How much sense is made depends on how much the audience is willing to invest in thinking about it. When a movie is as boring as MR, the audience doesn't think much about it. Frankly, I count as one of these people. I'm not convinced that the Wachowski's have anything interesting up their sleeve. Watching Matrix Reloaded, you don't feel like you're watching an inspired film. There was just so much missing from it.
"If you decide that the movie is dumb, and that you're just being lead a pile of Star Trek psuedo-morality and fight sceens, it's easy to miss a lot of the story as it's put in front of you... "
Sounds to me like what you're saying is that the director did a lousy job. Personally, I think what you're getting out of it was incidental. It is really difficult to imagine the Wachowskis are actually capable of delivering the subtltely you're talking about. I mean, if they can do that, then how come the exploding semi was so anti-climactic? At least Terminator 3 got that scene right.
"I don't see where the submitter gets off claiming that MR introduced us to *any* new cinematic technique, except perhaps for the fight scene with 200 Agent Smiths and not only was that done poorly but the whole thing could have been avoided if only Neo had done another one of his Superman jumps. In other words, it was gratuitous."
Wasn't even the first time, depending on how you look at it. Blade 2 had virtual actors and cameras in the fight scenes. Episode II... The original Matrix... Fight Club... I guess maybe he needs to tighten up his definition a bit. What it all boils down to here is that the content was, for the most part, original, but the techniques were not.
Wish I could comment on the article itself, but its Slashdotted.
"Let's make the distiction that Australia and New Zealand are two totally seperate countries, how would you like it if I called you a Canadian;-) "
I'd probably use that as an IQ test for ya. You see, as an average Slashdotter, there are a few simple ways to guage somebody's entire intelligence quotient.
- Did he distinguish beteen Canada and the United States?
- Did he refrain from using smilies or internet shorthand?
- Did he use apostrophe's correctly?
- Does he praise Linux and Mozilla?
- Did he correctly spell all the words in his post, especially the long ones that people rarely use?
- Does he hate George Bush?
If any of these questions are answered no, then your IQ is zilch!;)
Don't take it personally, I'm just going with the flow!
" new Player's Choice budget titles from Nintendo have been officially confirmed, including (from September 25th) Metroid Prime, Animal Crossing, and Super Mario Sunshine for $29.99"
Two months ago I bought Metroid Prime, new, for $19.99 at Blockbuster. It was still selling for $50 elsewhere. Anybody else seen that at other Blockbusters? (I still can't figure out why I got that so cheap.)
"Or how about: Shoplift $2000 worth of CDs and burn them on the Capitol's steps. I think that would send a message, and garner huge media time."
Um no.
Problem #1: Everybody's being accused of commiting theft as it is. Stealing CD's and burning them, no matter how 'amusing' it'd be, would not do anything but land you in jail. The media would be there to laugh at you.
Problem #2: You'd be hurting the retailer, not the RIAA. Frankly, I still have sympathy for those guys. I'd be disgusted if they became the victim instead of the RIAA.
That's the reason I suggested what I did. If the CD is returned unopened, they can still turn around and sell it. But somewhere they'll have a record that says "on this particular day, we had $n returns." If one day a million dollars of music CD's was purchased and then returned, believe me it'd show up on the radar of each of these retailers. Suddenly some recognition can happen. "Here is one million dollars you could have earned."
This is far more effective than a boycott. If you boycott the RIAA, then they'll claim they lost those sales to piracy.
"Keep it in the news that the RIAA squeezed $2,000 dollars out of a poor pre-teen who thought she had paid for the service to begin with. If they're going to play PR games, there's no reason people who despise them can't do the same thing."
I say we buy $2,000 worth of CD's and return them the next day.
"Whilst their games used to be new and exciting, it is all the 'same old same old' these days. I am getting tired of endless games with Mario in them."
I think you're confusing Mario for Sonic the Hedgehog. Seriously, what exactly is so insightful about this? The GameCube is not known for 'rehashes'. Now if you want to have a peek over at Sony and Microsoft's camp...
Frankly, I think this guy's just forgotten what fun gameplay is about. You can look at Mario Sunshine and say "yep, he's running around jumping like in Mario 64" and then put it down, or you can say "Oh cool, now that he's got this water pack, I've got a whole new toolbox of snazzy things to do in order to reach those high places." It's like comparing Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine by saying "Yep, they're on a space station, those two shows are exactly the same!" What a horrible thing to say about Deep Space Nine!
"The fact that it couldn't play DVDs, and the other two consoles could, definitely kept me from seriously considering it."
Somehow I doubt that this will affect your decision to buy a next gen machine. You've already got a DVD player now, why would it be a factor next time around? Even if you would, it's not so clear anybody else would. Who'd buy a game machine that plays VHS tapes?
Slashdot Mirror
"Hiroshima is gorgeous. It's not a crater and not a radioactive wasteland."
So the city still thrives. Besides the dome, are there areas that are left as they were after the blast?
Ugh I get such an awful feeling discussing this topic. Whatever problems we had with the Japanese in WW2, it's so difficult to imagine celebrating a moment like that today, even though I realize it marked a turning point in a brutal war.
Sorry for the run-on sentence there, I'm just rather fond of Japan.
"ready PITCHFORKS!"
I hate when satirical expressions on typical slashdotian responses is modded as troll. Lighten up!
"And during the funeral, a reckless prank is being..."
Oh wait a sec... listen to his coffin...
*tick tick tick tick....*
"After visiting Hiroshima on a school trip, and seeing the awesome destruction of nuclear weapons, I have been scared witless of them."
Whoah, that took me by surprise. Is Hiroshima as it was after the blast?
Sorry to sound ignorant, at least give me credit for asking. I haven't really thought about what Hiroshima would be today.
"How can Nintendo make such a poor decision? Don't the Japanese hear stories of how hellish AOL's connection speeds and busy signal rates are?"
Nintendo has stated before that they won't do on-line until they can make it reasonable for the player. They don't feel that a per month subscription is a good idea. AOL's big enough (and available enough) that they can probably work out a close to free approach. Maybe paid for advertising or something?
I didn't immediately balk at this story. An alternative provider doesn't immediately pop into mind. Remember that Nintendo's not after the niche audience here.
I don't get it. :(
Hmm.. this explains why my STFU posts always disappear.
You came in and posted something you knew would draw fire.
Incidentally, that is flamebait. If you had taken a more PC approach to your views, you might have had much less resistance to your claims. You knew better but you went on anyway.
"Incorrect, SMS is painfully similar to Mario 64 - many reviews have stated it, and even Nintendo themselves admitted that SMS was not up to scratch."
I felt that way in the beginning of the game. About a quarter of the way in or so the game really flourished. I found myself really challenged, as opposed to thinking about what to do to trigger whatever it was I wanted. SM64 felt so.. oh I dunno.. linear? Confined? With the pump and the the coins skittered about, the game became much more about exploration and having fun than 64 was. Gotta defend it here. The pump was much more than a simple addition, it turned the game on its side.
I'm not so quick to jump on board with whatever reviews you read. Those guys have to play that game and beat it before its lauched. They don't sit down and take the time to just enjoy the game and have fun, they're trying to get to the end. Anything can seem painfully repetitive in that concetrated of state.
"If you think that stating SMS is similar to Mario 64 is flamebait, then you do not actually know what flamebait is. Are you saying that everyone who stated so in a review is a troll, didn't understand the game or doesn't know what they are talking about?"
Don't get bitchy at me, I'm not attacking you. It wasn't that you compared the two games, it was the way you presented it. It didn't help that you said something along the lines of "well it has those characters therefore the games are similar". I don't remember your exact wording, but that's definitely how that was interpreted. Back in the 16-bit days, there was a thick line drawn between the SNES and the Genesis. You had the Sonic the Hedgehog people and the Mario people. Often each side never played the games of the other side. With this lack of information, a war grew. One of the complaints from the Sonic side was that there were so many Mario games. But the Mario boys knew something the Sonic boys didn't, the Mario games were vastly different from each other. Sonic, though, didn't change a whole lot. I guess you could relate it to the GTA -- GTA2 argument you made in another post. Nintendo fans have had to put up with this ill-informed bullshit for years. I'm not surprised AnonV's said what he has said, but I can't say I totally blame him. if you had altered your original post a bit, you wouldn't have had this problem.
Again, don't get shitty with me here. I'm not defending SMS to its death, I just happened to like it. You don't need to jump my ass over it.
"What you are saying is like someone trying to claim that GTA2 is vastly different to GTA."
No, not really. GTA -- GTA2 was not much more than a level upgrade. On the other hand, I wouldn't say Mario 64 to SMS would be the same as comparing GTA to GTA 3.
For the record, when I first started playing SMS I felt exactly the way you did. It wasn't until I got a few levels deep that I found the real charm of the game. If AnonV had the same experience I did, I could understand why he's saying you haven't played it. I'd suspect it myself. On the other hand, if I were hellbent on hating the game anyway, I'm not sure there's much it could do to convince me. I'm that way with Matrix Reloaded.
I was wondering if somebody'd take the bait. heh.
Congrats Painfully Average Anonymous Coward
"No, the case is that as usual Nintendo fans cannot bear the critisism."
In general, that may or may not be true. In this case, though, you made a really stupid comment. If I were you, I'd own up to that instead of trying to pass the blame off on Nintendo enthusiasm.
AnonV was absolutely correct that your comment likening Super Mario Sunshine to Mario 64 was disputable. One would really have to oversimplify to say they're the same. I have a feeling that's how you hit is hot button. I don't think he's bothered that you're criticizing Nintendo, I think he's bothered that you got modded as insightful/interesting over a comment that'd only ring true with people who haven't played the game.
As I said before, you really should just own up to what you said and move on. You two will never agree. Unfortunately for you, the facts of the matter are not on your side. One could launch reason after reason after reason why SMS is different from Mario 64, you'll still flush it all because you're mad at Nintendo for not satisfying you. The GameCube and the Mario games may not be what you want anymore, doesn't mean that Nintendo did anything wrong. With that in mind, do you really want to carry on with this petty argument?
Just own up. Blaming everybody else for your flamebait comment isn't going to end in a positive resolution.
"You say that you are a CG artist, huh? Could you have done that scene better?"
It was a team effort. Saying yes would make me sound conceited, saying no would make you think you've won your point. Never mind how good or bad I am, I can still see the flaws in it.
"Somehow, I seriously doubt it. If you could create something that even looked half as good, you'd be a millionaire. "
CG artists are not millionaires. The individuals that worked on that scene, even if you put their salaries together, are not millionaires.
Sorry you didn't like me badmouthing that horrible movie.
"Has it become cool to bash MR's effects?"
No, it has become uncool to defend a movie that sucked so badly. We want Hollywood to make good movies.
"Referring to the first Matrix's bullet time techniques as being "the same" as what's going on here makes no sense, since they're two totally different means of achieving that type of camera style."
They're not that dissimilar. In the bullet time technique, they used photographs mapped to a 3d mesh to generate the background. This was done in multiple scenes. The difference with MR was that the characters were CG rendered like the background, instead of just photographed. Unfortunately, the photo technique was more convincing.
"Given the stills that were shown during that SIGGRAPH presentation, which, incidentally, had side-by-side comparisons of the real and virtual actors shot under controlled lighting conditions, there's basically one thing that gives the digital doubles away--somehow, I doubt people were checking the shape of the back of Agent Smith's head during the Burly Brawl."
Hardly conclusive. People aren't imagining that they saw something strange there. The stills might have looked right, afterall the geometry and textures were scanned as opposed to built by hand. There were still errors there on the screen. The black suits were no longer black, they were gray, and something about the shading gave away that it was CG rendered. In terms of motion, they definitely did not look natural. I'm not sure if this was because they used a mo-cap performer that acted nothing like the guy who plays Agent Smith, or if it's because a lot of it was manually keyframed. Either way, something was still wrong about it. And, to top it all of, the choreography was ridiculous. You see, there's a rule you MUST follow when you create a kung-fu movie. If the bad guy gets hit, he falls down. Neo gets up on his pole and starts running in circles stepping on everybody's face, and somehow manages to get good speed here. Can anybody honestly tell me this would ever work?
The technology may have been there, but the ball was dropped in so many places.
"I guess now I chalk a lot of this up to inability to completely suspend belief when I'm watching scenes that I know are physically impossible to shoot."
Nope. Wouldn't recommend that. I think if more time was put into that scene, a lot of the bitching about it would die down. Besides, I don't remember the Two Towers causing this kind of bitching.
"Also, some of those Burly Brawl shots are just head replacements, so look for those Agent Smiths that don't quite have the right face and then come back and tell me that all those CG bodies look fake."
It looked fake. The sooner you own up to that the sooner you can move on. I'm a CG artist myself. I know what went on in this movie. They had plenty of time to know that it was going to cause people to go "What the fuck?!"
"I'm sorry, but have you ever seen an action movie before? They aren't very good when the protagonist avoids all conflict..."
Well something's really wrong then because that scene didn't make this a good action movie. It deterred.
"Now, switch to Matrix Reloaded. You now have a totally different technique where something can happen that simply doesn't map to the real world at all. You go through the first part of the first movie's "bullet-time" process, filming real-world elements as required, and establishing your camera and timing tracks. Then you switch to 100% CG, for elements (e.g. Neo swooping in to pick up Morpheus and the Keymaker) that could never be fillmed, even against a green-screen with wires. The CG is based on the footage that you have, and uses textures, 3D-location information and other details that you have extracted, but ultimately it's the CG equivalent of rotoscoping."
Nope, the effect's still not all that different from the original movie. In the 'bullet-time' effects, the background was completely CG rendered using photos from the set. The only real difference was that they didn't build the character himself in 3D as well. They basically took the effect from the first movie and introduced animated characters as well as settings. We're not talking a really huge leap here. Pity that the CG effects in MR were less effective in convincing the audience than in the Matrix.
"You're comparing real-world composites to computer generated images and saying that they didn't look as natural, without actually realizing that you're looking at nothing more than a drawing! That's perhaps one of the most important benchmarks in modern computer graphics that I can imagine!"
I'm not sure I understood this comment. Are you referring to the virtual state these guys live in inside the Matrix? If not, clarify?
"If you look at any scene in that movie with those ideas as your lens, it starts to make a lot more sense, and you start to see just how devious the third movie can get...."
How much sense is made depends on how much the audience is willing to invest in thinking about it. When a movie is as boring as MR, the audience doesn't think much about it. Frankly, I count as one of these people. I'm not convinced that the Wachowski's have anything interesting up their sleeve. Watching Matrix Reloaded, you don't feel like you're watching an inspired film. There was just so much missing from it.
"If you decide that the movie is dumb, and that you're just being lead a pile of Star Trek psuedo-morality and fight sceens, it's easy to miss a lot of the story as it's put in front of you... "
Sounds to me like what you're saying is that the director did a lousy job. Personally, I think what you're getting out of it was incidental. It is really difficult to imagine the Wachowskis are actually capable of delivering the subtltely you're talking about. I mean, if they can do that, then how come the exploding semi was so anti-climactic? At least Terminator 3 got that scene right.
Revolutions is not going to redeem MR.
"I don't see where the submitter gets off claiming that MR introduced us to *any* new cinematic technique, except perhaps for the fight scene with 200 Agent Smiths and not only was that done poorly but the whole thing could have been avoided if only Neo had done another one of his Superman jumps. In other words, it was gratuitous."
Wasn't even the first time, depending on how you look at it. Blade 2 had virtual actors and cameras in the fight scenes. Episode II... The original Matrix... Fight Club... I guess maybe he needs to tighten up his definition a bit. What it all boils down to here is that the content was, for the most part, original, but the techniques were not.
Wish I could comment on the article itself, but its Slashdotted.
He's talking about recess. Funny thing is you could have determined by that your own observation. "Why would rain outside cause them to watch a movie?
I agree with AnonV, you have some serious issues regarding common sense.
Ya know, even if you don't have a NUON or don't care about the game itself, the details about porting the game are pretty interesting.
I have to admit, though, I was under the impression the NUON was more powerful than it was. Maybe it's just kinda weak in the 2d area.
"2. Copy CD to electronic medium."
Not sure if you're trying to be funny or not, but copying the CD would mean opening it. It's gotta be unopened before you can return it.
Sorry to be a spoil sport but I don't want people thinking Im suggesting that.
"Let's make the distiction that Australia and New Zealand are two totally seperate countries, how would you like it if I called you a Canadian ;-) "
;)
I'd probably use that as an IQ test for ya. You see, as an average Slashdotter, there are a few simple ways to guage somebody's entire intelligence quotient.
- Did he distinguish beteen Canada and the United States?
- Did he refrain from using smilies or internet shorthand?
- Did he use apostrophe's correctly?
- Does he praise Linux and Mozilla?
- Did he correctly spell all the words in his post, especially the long ones that people rarely use?
- Does he hate George Bush?
If any of these questions are answered no, then your IQ is zilch!
Don't take it personally, I'm just going with the flow!
" new Player's Choice budget titles from Nintendo have been officially confirmed, including (from September 25th) Metroid Prime, Animal Crossing, and Super Mario Sunshine for $29.99"
Two months ago I bought Metroid Prime, new, for $19.99 at Blockbuster. It was still selling for $50 elsewhere. Anybody else seen that at other Blockbusters? (I still can't figure out why I got that so cheap.)
"Or how about: Shoplift $2000 worth of CDs and burn them on the Capitol's steps. I think that would send a message, and garner huge media time."
Um no.
Problem #1: Everybody's being accused of commiting theft as it is. Stealing CD's and burning them, no matter how 'amusing' it'd be, would not do anything but land you in jail. The media would be there to laugh at you.
Problem #2: You'd be hurting the retailer, not the RIAA. Frankly, I still have sympathy for those guys. I'd be disgusted if they became the victim instead of the RIAA.
That's the reason I suggested what I did. If the CD is returned unopened, they can still turn around and sell it. But somewhere they'll have a record that says "on this particular day, we had $n returns." If one day a million dollars of music CD's was purchased and then returned, believe me it'd show up on the radar of each of these retailers. Suddenly some recognition can happen. "Here is one million dollars you could have earned."
This is far more effective than a boycott. If you boycott the RIAA, then they'll claim they lost those sales to piracy.
"Keep it in the news that the RIAA squeezed $2,000 dollars out of a poor pre-teen who thought she had paid for the service to begin with. If they're going to play PR games, there's no reason people who despise them can't do the same thing."
I say we buy $2,000 worth of CD's and return them the next day.
"Whilst their games used to be new and exciting, it is all the 'same old same old' these days. I am getting tired of endless games with Mario in them."
I think you're confusing Mario for Sonic the Hedgehog. Seriously, what exactly is so insightful about this? The GameCube is not known for 'rehashes'. Now if you want to have a peek over at Sony and Microsoft's camp...
Frankly, I think this guy's just forgotten what fun gameplay is about. You can look at Mario Sunshine and say "yep, he's running around jumping like in Mario 64" and then put it down, or you can say "Oh cool, now that he's got this water pack, I've got a whole new toolbox of snazzy things to do in order to reach those high places." It's like comparing Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine by saying "Yep, they're on a space station, those two shows are exactly the same!" What a horrible thing to say about Deep Space Nine!
"The fact that it couldn't play DVDs, and the other two consoles could, definitely kept me from seriously considering it."
Somehow I doubt that this will affect your decision to buy a next gen machine. You've already got a DVD player now, why would it be a factor next time around? Even if you would, it's not so clear anybody else would. Who'd buy a game machine that plays VHS tapes?