" First Lindows get bought off my M$ for the name..."
Bought off? They gave up right around the time that the legal battle wasn't headline news anymore. Funny thing is, they cited legal costs as the reason to break off the pursuit. You'd have thunk they would have considered using a very simple way to avoid all those nasty legal fees by... oh.. I dunno.. not making a product look like Windows and give it a name that sounds very much like it.
I have no fricken clue why none of you see the Lindows battle as a marketing stunt. I mean, seriously guys, who in their right mind would intentionally go into legal battle with a company sporting an army of lawyers? Of all the times for Slashdot to NOT go into paranoid tin-foil hat conspiracy mode. "We gave Microsoft the raspberry now they're picking on us!! Pity us and remember our brand!"
" The reason why there are one or two gems and a whole lot of crap out there is because truly creative minds can't get in."
Um, no. The reason there are only a couple of gems out there (actually, a good game doesn't have to be a 'gem', only good.) is that the 'goodness' of a game is dependent on the WHOLE thing being executed well. A game will not survive on concept alone.
Here, I'll use a less subjective example: Remember that early episode of the Simpsons where Homer designed a car? Oh, he was VERY creative about it. It had two domes, driver and passenger up front, kids in their own isolated dome. It had this horrible fins that were cool in the 50's. It had a horn that played La Cuca Rocha. And it cost.. if I recall properly... $80,000.
It is VERY easy to make these kinds of ridiculous mistakes in a game. You can make a game that costs way too much to make. You can make an innovative concept that falls flat on its face because the interface stinks. (Rise of the Robots comes to mind... argh.) You can make a concept work, but the graphics can fail to convey the concept well enough to execute it. You can easily misbalance the fairness of a game thus rendering it frustrating for the players. Etc.
My point? Yeah, there's a lot of me-too games out there. (FPS shooters come to mind.) Why? For the simple reason that no matter what kind of game you make, you need more things to go right than to go wrong. In simpler terms: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Even in the case of FPS games, great concepts are destroyed by factors that aren't controlled necessarily by creative talent. Imagine what would happen if the driving in San Andreas was mis-adjusted. A great concept would fall flat on its face.
There is a LOT of creative talent in this market. Unfortunately, more often than not, creative ideas are not GOOD ideas. Don't believe me? Pick your favorite TV show and read some fan fiction of it.
So what's the problem with me-too games? Hey, I'm sick of it, too. The problem, though, isn't that creative talent is shut out. (On the contrary. Creativity is what gets you jobs in this business.) The problem is risk. It's too easy for a game to be bad. We need more risk takers out there, and we need for the rewards to be greater.
Amusingly, I don't have a suggestion on how to fix that problem.
"Doesn't that kinda take the fun out of a First Person Shooter?"
Sure. Unlike the PC, though, there are a LOT more games out there than just FPSs.
Playing with people on-line is very sterile compared to playing against the guy sitting right next to you. I had a lot more fun playing Killer Instinct with my step-brothers than I ever did playing Quake on-line. Heck, I remember going to a friend's house when I was kid. He had an NES and he'd invite a bunch of us over. We'd all take turns. Sometimes it was baseball. Sometimes it was Contra. Sometimes it was Battletoads.
Baseball was interesting because it was game of skill. We'd brag and brag and brag about how great we were at it. Then we'd make asses of ourselves. Then somebody'd pull off something unlikely and we'd all have a shouting match about whether it was luck or not. Contra was the most dramatic. Everybody had the same goal in it. We'd work as a team trying to beat it. Battletoads was somewhere in between. Often it'd start out as a team trying to get to the end, but then we'd end up just kicking the crap out of each other. Many laughs were had.
Never had that experience in Quake. Sure, it had its moments. Sure, sometimes something really funny'd happen. Heck, I've done my share of taunting and friend making. It's not the same.
Funny thing is, after saying all that, I still had a good deal of fun playing Goldeneye in 2 player mode despite the limitations you've mentioned. Heck, a coworker and I used to play Quake after work. It was more fun sitting next to him on a seperate machine than it was playing with the random assortment of dorks on-line.
I used to work at a software company that licensed some code to a game developer you've all heard of. Those were the numbers thrown out.
Was it the controller comment maybe? Apologies if it came out rude, but come on. Who all here has had friends over to play Nintendo? Who can honestly say that playing Quake is a better social experience than that?
"The computer isn't dead for gaming, and in my opinion, will never be overshadowed by consoles."
Actually it's always been overshadowed by consoles. Game developers make a lot more money on consoles than they do the PC. PC Game makers, for example, shoot for 100,000 copies sold. Console game makers shoot for half a mil.
"what makes most PC games so much better than the console games is the amount of personal interactivity with people. I can talk to the people i'm playing with in counter-strike. I can't do that with a console (excluding some horrid voicecom)."
Heh. You should try buying a second controller and inviting a friend over.;)
That's part of the problem. The other part of the problem is that in the USA, you can't drive for a day and wind up in another country that speaks a different language. Shake your head if you like, but it's hard to remember a language if you don't get much chance to use it. This country's pretty fucking big.
Overrated...? C'mon, guys. It's not an insult to Nintendo to say that they aren't huge fans of nudity in video games. We will NEVER see a slutty Princess Peach. No offense to be had here, it's Nintendo's way.
"Windows 2003? That breaks when you install it? Or breaks when you apply a hotfix? Or breaks when you reboot it? (blue screens and dumps) Or breaks when you add new hardware? Or... Well... You get the idea.."
Ah yes. Let's wave our pitchforks at MS for spreading FUD by.... spreading FUD.
"The problem with small fines like traffic tickets are that you need to prove that you are innocent of the crime vs. having to prove that you are guilty."
To be fair, in the event of a traffic ticket a trained officer has 'caught you in the act'. (As opposed to finding evidence that you might have done it and making a case for it.)
Not saying it's right, but I can understand the mentality.
"Over 8 hours of power for something the size of an SUV? And we don't have these for cars because?"
Please forgive my ignorance, but wouldn't an undersea vehicle require a good deal less energy than an SUV travelling at 60mph for 8 hours?
Re:dedicated devices are better
on
The Handheld War
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"1) pc for work/console for gaming.
2) mobile phone for calls/gba,ds for gaming/ipod for portable music.
3) games draw way too much power from the mobile phones.
4) gaming while waiting for call=bad.
5) games on mobile phones SUCK."
Yet, all these points are completely moot if you have your cell phone with you, but not your game machine. It is truely amazing that so many people assume that everybody carries a digital camera, video camera, iPod, and GameBoy around everywhere they go.
That doesn't affect my opinion too much, but for different reason. I'm all for making trust into something very difficult to regain. Unfortunately, though, Slashdot's taking it to an idiotically dangerous extreme. When anybody is compared against Microsoft, they are automatically in the right.
For example: Several years ago, there was a story that Microsoft 'threw Sony out of CeBit'. Pretty clear headline, right? Microsoft is a big bully and they kicked Sony out of a tradeshow. Those evil anti-competitive bastards. Only, that's not what happened. Sony and Microsoft were showing their game systems. There was a rule at CeBit that you could NOT have playable units at the show. (I'm guessing so there weren't lines of ppl all over the place.) Microsoft was abiding by this rule (ShocK!) but Sony wasn't. Microsoft notified the people running the show. The rule was pretty clear, and Sony was pretty clearly breaking it, so they approached them and asked them to follow the rules. Sony got huffy, packed up all their PS2s, and walked off the floor. The real headline should have been "Sony is caught breaking the rules, throws a temper tantrum, and leaves CeBit.". Bad guy: Sony. But but but Microsoft had a bit part to play in this little story, so they OBVIOUSLY were in the wrong here. Those unfairly competing bastards. mmm mhmmm.
To make a long story short, judgement is far from objective and ignorance is reigning. By the time anybody here notices Google's transition to the dark side, the damage will already have been done.
"It's fun to use and all, but why would I have that many windows open, and then need to sort a lot of documents through them? Moreover, with dual screens and/or multiple desktops, overlapping windows should be mostly a thing of the past."
Nope. I'm doing plugin development for Lightwave. I have a small LW window open. I have my editor open. I have a few file windows open. (Yes, I need them for this.) I have a PDF viewer open for documentation. I have a web browser open for accessing the knowledgebase. I sometimes even have an ICQ window open so I can talk to the people testing the code. I run dual monitors at 1600 by 1200 each, and I still have a bunch of overlapping going on.
Couldn't tell you if this particular desktop management system would do me any good or not (couldn't get the page to load) but I'll take any help I can get.
Slashdot Mirror
"Wouldn't a patch for this sort of thing require all of 10 seconds to make?"
Aren't there a hell of a lot of machines to patch?
" First Lindows get bought off my M$ for the name..."
Bought off? They gave up right around the time that the legal battle wasn't headline news anymore. Funny thing is, they cited legal costs as the reason to break off the pursuit. You'd have thunk they would have considered using a very simple way to avoid all those nasty legal fees by... oh.. I dunno.. not making a product look like Windows and give it a name that sounds very much like it.
I have no fricken clue why none of you see the Lindows battle as a marketing stunt. I mean, seriously guys, who in their right mind would intentionally go into legal battle with a company sporting an army of lawyers? Of all the times for Slashdot to NOT go into paranoid tin-foil hat conspiracy mode. "We gave Microsoft the raspberry now they're picking on us!! Pity us and remember our brand!"
" The reason why there are one or two gems and a whole lot of crap out there is because truly creative minds can't get in."
Um, no. The reason there are only a couple of gems out there (actually, a good game doesn't have to be a 'gem', only good.) is that the 'goodness' of a game is dependent on the WHOLE thing being executed well. A game will not survive on concept alone.
Here, I'll use a less subjective example: Remember that early episode of the Simpsons where Homer designed a car? Oh, he was VERY creative about it. It had two domes, driver and passenger up front, kids in their own isolated dome. It had this horrible fins that were cool in the 50's. It had a horn that played La Cuca Rocha. And it cost.. if I recall properly... $80,000.
It is VERY easy to make these kinds of ridiculous mistakes in a game. You can make a game that costs way too much to make. You can make an innovative concept that falls flat on its face because the interface stinks. (Rise of the Robots comes to mind... argh.) You can make a concept work, but the graphics can fail to convey the concept well enough to execute it. You can easily misbalance the fairness of a game thus rendering it frustrating for the players. Etc.
My point? Yeah, there's a lot of me-too games out there. (FPS shooters come to mind.) Why? For the simple reason that no matter what kind of game you make, you need more things to go right than to go wrong. In simpler terms: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Even in the case of FPS games, great concepts are destroyed by factors that aren't controlled necessarily by creative talent. Imagine what would happen if the driving in San Andreas was mis-adjusted. A great concept would fall flat on its face.
There is a LOT of creative talent in this market. Unfortunately, more often than not, creative ideas are not GOOD ideas. Don't believe me? Pick your favorite TV show and read some fan fiction of it.
So what's the problem with me-too games? Hey, I'm sick of it, too. The problem, though, isn't that creative talent is shut out. (On the contrary. Creativity is what gets you jobs in this business.) The problem is risk. It's too easy for a game to be bad. We need more risk takers out there, and we need for the rewards to be greater.
Amusingly, I don't have a suggestion on how to fix that problem.
"Aren't there still game companies other than EA?"
Yep. What he said was akin to saying "I watched the Star Wars prequels so I won't go see movies anymore."
"Easy, these prices are proportional to the penetration indice of your previous software : a monopoly charge high fees, an outsider small ones."
Or, in simpler terms, Supply & Demand.
"Nobody owns XP, it's licensed, like most software."
Oh, yeah, that made a big fucking dent in his point.
"Doesn't that kinda take the fun out of a First Person Shooter?"
Sure. Unlike the PC, though, there are a LOT more games out there than just FPSs.
Playing with people on-line is very sterile compared to playing against the guy sitting right next to you. I had a lot more fun playing Killer Instinct with my step-brothers than I ever did playing Quake on-line. Heck, I remember going to a friend's house when I was kid. He had an NES and he'd invite a bunch of us over. We'd all take turns. Sometimes it was baseball. Sometimes it was Contra. Sometimes it was Battletoads.
Baseball was interesting because it was game of skill. We'd brag and brag and brag about how great we were at it. Then we'd make asses of ourselves. Then somebody'd pull off something unlikely and we'd all have a shouting match about whether it was luck or not. Contra was the most dramatic. Everybody had the same goal in it. We'd work as a team trying to beat it. Battletoads was somewhere in between. Often it'd start out as a team trying to get to the end, but then we'd end up just kicking the crap out of each other. Many laughs were had.
Never had that experience in Quake. Sure, it had its moments. Sure, sometimes something really funny'd happen. Heck, I've done my share of taunting and friend making. It's not the same.
Funny thing is, after saying all that, I still had a good deal of fun playing Goldeneye in 2 player mode despite the limitations you've mentioned. Heck, a coworker and I used to play Quake after work. It was more fun sitting next to him on a seperate machine than it was playing with the random assortment of dorks on-line.
There's a reason why lan parties happen today.
Troll...? Bullshit.
I used to work at a software company that licensed some code to a game developer you've all heard of. Those were the numbers thrown out.
Was it the controller comment maybe? Apologies if it came out rude, but come on. Who all here has had friends over to play Nintendo? Who can honestly say that playing Quake is a better social experience than that?
"The film is written by Matrix creators Andy and Larry Wachowski and stars Hugo Weaving and fan favorite Star Wars star Natalie Portman."
Wow, if they had just used the word prequel, my lack of interest would be complete.
"The computer isn't dead for gaming, and in my opinion, will never be overshadowed by consoles."
;)
Actually it's always been overshadowed by consoles. Game developers make a lot more money on consoles than they do the PC. PC Game makers, for example, shoot for 100,000 copies sold. Console game makers shoot for half a mil.
"what makes most PC games so much better than the console games is the amount of personal interactivity with people. I can talk to the people i'm playing with in counter-strike. I can't do that with a console (excluding some horrid voicecom)."
Heh. You should try buying a second controller and inviting a friend over.
"Blame the crappy setup of the school system."
That's part of the problem. The other part of the problem is that in the USA, you can't drive for a day and wind up in another country that speaks a different language. Shake your head if you like, but it's hard to remember a language if you don't get much chance to use it. This country's pretty fucking big.
"PDF has no place on the Internet, thats why we use HTML , but that would interfere with Adobes buisness model"
Bullshit. Have you ever tried printing a PDF file?
PDF has its place, but I agree in this case it was silly.
Overrated...? C'mon, guys. It's not an insult to Nintendo to say that they aren't huge fans of nudity in video games. We will NEVER see a slutty Princess Peach. No offense to be had here, it's Nintendo's way.
" At this rate kids won't be able to play Mario because Princess Peach is dressed too slutty."
Oh yeah, because Nintendo's been leading the charge for the last 20 years to reveal more skin in video games. Great example, Mr. Dumas.
"Windows Vista, that doesn't sound quite right. I think they're running out of names."
Yeah, gee, if they could only come up with something as cool as Gentoo, Suse, or Linspire.
The first time I worked out my dad's adult BBS password. Ham Radio operators aren't typically very good at choosing non-obvious passwords. ;)
Ah yes. Let's wave our pitchforks at MS for spreading FUD by
"The problem with small fines like traffic tickets are that you need to prove that you are innocent of the crime vs. having to prove that you are guilty."
To be fair, in the event of a traffic ticket a trained officer has 'caught you in the act'. (As opposed to finding evidence that you might have done it and making a case for it.)
Not saying it's right, but I can understand the mentality.
"Over 8 hours of power for something the size of an SUV? And we don't have these for cars because?"
Please forgive my ignorance, but wouldn't an undersea vehicle require a good deal less energy than an SUV travelling at 60mph for 8 hours?
Yet, all these points are completely moot if you have your cell phone with you, but not your game machine. It is truely amazing that so many people assume that everybody carries a digital camera, video camera, iPod, and GameBoy around everywhere they go.
That doesn't affect my opinion too much, but for different reason. I'm all for making trust into something very difficult to regain. Unfortunately, though, Slashdot's taking it to an idiotically dangerous extreme. When anybody is compared against Microsoft, they are automatically in the right.
For example: Several years ago, there was a story that Microsoft 'threw Sony out of CeBit'. Pretty clear headline, right? Microsoft is a big bully and they kicked Sony out of a tradeshow. Those evil anti-competitive bastards. Only, that's not what happened. Sony and Microsoft were showing their game systems. There was a rule at CeBit that you could NOT have playable units at the show. (I'm guessing so there weren't lines of ppl all over the place.) Microsoft was abiding by this rule (ShocK!) but Sony wasn't. Microsoft notified the people running the show. The rule was pretty clear, and Sony was pretty clearly breaking it, so they approached them and asked them to follow the rules. Sony got huffy, packed up all their PS2s, and walked off the floor. The real headline should have been "Sony is caught breaking the rules, throws a temper tantrum, and leaves CeBit.". Bad guy: Sony. But but but Microsoft had a bit part to play in this little story, so they OBVIOUSLY were in the wrong here. Those unfairly competing bastards. mmm mhmmm.
To make a long story short, judgement is far from objective and ignorance is reigning. By the time anybody here notices Google's transition to the dark side, the damage will already have been done.
"+5 Insightful"
Agreed.
"Isn't it possible that they're deserved?"
Nobody deserves to be regarded in such a way that in everyone's eyes they can do no wrong.
"And do they have puppy fries?"
Go to Long John Silver's and ask for hush puppies.
"It's fun to use and all, but why would I have that many windows open, and then need to sort a lot of documents through them? Moreover, with dual screens and/or multiple desktops, overlapping windows should be mostly a thing of the past."
Nope. I'm doing plugin development for Lightwave. I have a small LW window open. I have my editor open. I have a few file windows open. (Yes, I need them for this.) I have a PDF viewer open for documentation. I have a web browser open for accessing the knowledgebase. I sometimes even have an ICQ window open so I can talk to the people testing the code. I run dual monitors at 1600 by 1200 each, and I still have a bunch of overlapping going on.
Couldn't tell you if this particular desktop management system would do me any good or not (couldn't get the page to load) but I'll take any help I can get.