Do these actually exist, or is this just a plan with an unspecified future implementation date?
At the Apple/EMI press conference a few weeks ago, the guy from EMI said they would be selling DRM free stuff on iTunes eventually, but he did say they would be selling 320kbps DRM-free mp3s of "The Good, The Bad, and the Queen" immediately on the band's website. So EMI is selling DRM-free music now, it's just not widely implemented yet.
Here's a short article on the A.I. in the game F.E.A.R., "F.E.A.R.'s AI Demystified", (in more detail here). Having played through F.E.A.R., what impressed me so much was that a lot of what is called A.I. is actually audio and animation. You can make enemies seem way more intelligent than they really are by doing stuff like have detailed animations for stuff like hopping over barriers or diving through windows that's triggered when they are in certain spots. They would also have the enemies shout stuff, if you had your flashlight on they would scream "Flashlight" and dive for cover.
Thing is nobody wants to start work at 7 in the morning, so the government went out and renamed 7 as 8 for most of the year, and idiots think they're getting "more daylight" rather than getting up an hour earlier. Personally I'd rather everyone go on Greenwich Mean Time so I could start work at 13:00 and get off at 21:30, but apparently that's too confusing for some people.
He was interviewed on NPR a few weeks ago, so surely they did some research to see if he's legit.
James Frey was a bestselling writer who had appeared Oprah and had done tons of interviews and a movie deal before anyone did the slightest bit of research to see if his memoir was legit. It's certainly within the realm of possibility of being fake.
You're right, some of this stuff could be guessable, and guessing the origin of redacted words by analyzing length has come up before on slashdot: Student Uncovers US Military Secrets.
Somebody probably got paid off. My feeling is that this whole movement to "legislate video games" was just a way to extort campaign contributions from a multi-billion dollar industry. Like how the democrats don't complain about obscene rap music anymore.
I have a problem with how the controls work in that I feel they're inconsistent and overcomplicated. For instance there are three different sub-screens you can go to, one for your map and two different inventory screens. For the first inventory screen you press A to exit but the other inventory screen and map screen you press B to exit. The A button can attack with a sword but with a lantern it puts it out, you use B to swing a lantern. And to refill a lantern you have to go to one of the inventory screens, map a jar of lantern oil to the d-pad, exit the screen by pressing A (not B which is used to exit the other screens) then press the d-pad which usually swaps an item to your B button but in this case uses a jar, but when I want to refill a jar I have to equip it with the d-pad then press B. I think it would have been better if the game filled your lantern automatically or you did it in the equipment screen. Another problem I have is that sometimes you have to hold down the A button to push/pull objects but sometimes you press A to grab and press A again to let go.
Funny thing I noticed is that the Wii remote doesn't detect all types of movement, for instance if i place it on a table and rotate it clockwise or counterclockwise no movement is detected except for some vibration. It only seems to detect rotation in relation to gravity, like tilting onto it's side or tilting back or forward. That sensor bar should help a lot but even then I guess it would only help while the remote is pointing towards the sensor bar.
Yeah I'd go with ICO and Shadow the Colossus. SotC is one of the poignant games I've ever played, and the thrill of leaping onto a giant monster as it soars through the air and then hanging on for dear life is a great experience. And it's one of those games that you really need to play first hand, you could watch someone play a cutscene heavy game like the Metal Gear Solid series and get most of the experience but SotC should be played, and it requires quite a bit of dexterity to do so.
Admittedly, playing an FPS with the Wiimote takes some getting used to, but once you do, you will never want to go back to dual-analog. I played through CoD3 over the last two days, and it took me a solid 90 minutes to get accustomed to using the Wiimote as is necessary to get through the game.
90 minutes is pretty good, WASD + keyboard took hours and hours to get used to. Using the mouse to look around was such a bizarre concept that when Quake came out you had to hold down a key to look around. It took years for the WASD keyboard setup to become standard (it wasn't until around when Quake 2 is when it became the default).
I like it too, while Vaan and Penelo are typical teenage Final Fantasy characters, the rest of the cast has a very "western" feel to them, Balthier and Basch would be at home in Oblivion. While I like the characters, have you noticed all the parallels to Star Wars? Like this was inspired from another forum:
Vaan - Luke Ashe - Leia Balthier - Han Solo Fran - Chewie Basch - Aragorn (okay two sources) Judge - Darth Vader Bounty Hunter Bangaa - Boba Fett
At one point in the game you even visit a "Cloud City" type place that is being tolerated by the "Empire" and run by someone who may or may not be working for them.
so does that mean the other 800 or 900 work fine? i don't own a ps2 or ps3 - i own a gamecube, but when i go into a gamestop (or something similar) it feels like there are thousands of play station games out there, me i've just got to look for the little bitty gc section.
There are about 16'000 different PS1 and PS2 titles, counting all regions... source.
They are technically correct, but they just look out of place in business communication. Writing "u" instead of "you" is just one of those things.
Tell me about it, I got this external USB drive and I was looking at the instructions and I'm not sure what "u can whop the USBcable from the USB port" means...
External USB hard disk manual.
Any time I'm in a local coffeeshop or other place where there are people using notebook computers, 30-50% of them are Macs (typically iBooks and non-pro MacBooks). Five years ago this was unheard of.
I've been assuming Apple was just paying people to hang out in trendy coffee shops with Macbooks.
If they realise that 60% of CD purchasers are ripping content then why on Earth are they trying to make it more difficult? If this guy is correct then increased anti-piracy measures will alienate more than half of their target audience.
They're making it more difficult because they want you to rebuy all your stuff on iTunes and the like, not rip stuff you already have. They want to consumers to get frustrated and say "Guess I'll have to buy The White Album again." Though I agree that alienation is more likely.
The way you deal with supply/demand imbalance is to raise prices, not make people wait in line.
There is a very good reason for not raising prices, if the Wii or the PS3 was priced higher, then while those companies would make more money, some people would be turned off by the high price and buy an XBOX 360. And once someone already owns a 360 they are less likely to buy another console in the future because of the investment. By pricing the PS3 and Wii lower than demand, instead of buying a 360 people may wait for the other consoles to become available. Also, optimal pricing is hard to predict, like the 360 in Japan (which got a small fraction of consoles compared to North America) and the PSP didn't sell out at launch.
While I'd like to see more detailed data, the conclusion seems plausible enough. But I'm curious about the long term effect of bad reviews on a franchise. For example, games like Driv3r and Enter the Matrix may have sold really well despite bad reviews, but if a game is bad people aren't going to buy the sequel, the frachise has been badly tarnished, and I don't think Driver 4 or Path of Neo sold that well (I may be wrong though). Tomb Raider is another franchise that used to be really huge but got tarnished by bad sequels. Acclaim Entertainment killed themselves with too many bad games.
Why is congress getting involved? Isn't this area sufficiently covered by state and federal law that they can leave it up to an Attorney General somewhere?
It's may not be, the HP thing has been big news lately because there's debate as to wether it is covered by law, it's not clear if pretexting phone records is illegal since it's "non-financial" information.
This year, like every year, has had some great movies and some bad ones. In the past year, we've had Superman Returns, Pirates of the Carribean 2, United 93, Munich, Millions, Crash, Capote, Match Point, Hustle & Flow, Batman Begins, Sin City, Walk the Line, Murderball, The Constant Gardener, A History of Violence, March of the Penguins, Wallace & Grommit...
Agree with you almost %100 (I thought Superman Returns was so-so) but last year and this year there have been some other great films like Squid and the Whale, Grizzly Man, Nobody Knows, Lady Vengence, my favourite film of last year A Bittersweet Life, and some really good martial arts films in District 13 and SPL. And there are still a lot films that I haven't had time to get around to yet like Cache, V for Vendetta, Scanner Darkly... I'd say there are too many good films out there.
If Matt Groening can get rich from creating the Simpsons I don't see why not the same thing could happen in the future with someone who creates some popular CG characters, it'll probably be rare though.
It's entirely possible it was left in accidently, people with hex editors find stuff left over from earlier builds all the time in games. For example, Bioware got criticism for Kotor II when people found dialogue from a more elaborate ending left in the game (suggesting the game was rushed) and a Japanese preview demo for the game Xenosaga III accidently included all the dialogue for the game. Those weren't Easter Eggs, that was stuff that the companies wished they hadn't released.
On a related note, I read an interview with the people behind Indigo Prophecy were they said they had to take extra care to make sure none of the code for the uncensored European release was in the American version. Normally you would could REM out some code but because of the Hot Coffee incident they had to make a more thorough audit of the code.
Even though I think this got blown way out of proportion, I'm very curious to what really happened.
and then shoehorning in the most forced "OMGZ, I've been hunting you as a serial killer suspect for the last couple of weeks, and even though we've only ever spoken TWICE I now want to jump your cold, dead, zombie bones so we can have a zombie love-child convenient to the hackneyed plot!"
I have this theory that everything that happens to Lucas after he falls off that roller coaster and "dies" is a sort of dream of his, where he fantasizes about being reborn and having sex with the woman investigating him and having super powers. Sorta like the film "Minority Report", where some people think that the reality of the plot ends when Tom Cruise's character is imprisoned.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a short article on the A.I. in the game F.E.A.R., "F.E.A.R.'s AI Demystified", (in more detail here). Having played through F.E.A.R., what impressed me so much was that a lot of what is called A.I. is actually audio and animation. You can make enemies seem way more intelligent than they really are by doing stuff like have detailed animations for stuff like hopping over barriers or diving through windows that's triggered when they are in certain spots. They would also have the enemies shout stuff, if you had your flashlight on they would scream "Flashlight" and dive for cover.
Thing is nobody wants to start work at 7 in the morning, so the government went out and renamed 7 as 8 for most of the year, and idiots think they're getting "more daylight" rather than getting up an hour earlier. Personally I'd rather everyone go on Greenwich Mean Time so I could start work at 13:00 and get off at 21:30, but apparently that's too confusing for some people.
You're right, some of this stuff could be guessable, and guessing the origin of redacted words by analyzing length has come up before on slashdot: Student Uncovers US Military Secrets.
Somebody probably got paid off. My feeling is that this whole movement to "legislate video games" was just a way to extort campaign contributions from a multi-billion dollar industry. Like how the democrats don't complain about obscene rap music anymore.
I have a problem with how the controls work in that I feel they're inconsistent and overcomplicated. For instance there are three different sub-screens you can go to, one for your map and two different inventory screens. For the first inventory screen you press A to exit but the other inventory screen and map screen you press B to exit. The A button can attack with a sword but with a lantern it puts it out, you use B to swing a lantern. And to refill a lantern you have to go to one of the inventory screens, map a jar of lantern oil to the d-pad, exit the screen by pressing A (not B which is used to exit the other screens) then press the d-pad which usually swaps an item to your B button but in this case uses a jar, but when I want to refill a jar I have to equip it with the d-pad then press B. I think it would have been better if the game filled your lantern automatically or you did it in the equipment screen. Another problem I have is that sometimes you have to hold down the A button to push/pull objects but sometimes you press A to grab and press A again to let go.
Funny thing I noticed is that the Wii remote doesn't detect all types of movement, for instance if i place it on a table and rotate it clockwise or counterclockwise no movement is detected except for some vibration. It only seems to detect rotation in relation to gravity, like tilting onto it's side or tilting back or forward. That sensor bar should help a lot but even then I guess it would only help while the remote is pointing towards the sensor bar.
Yeah I'd go with ICO and Shadow the Colossus. SotC is one of the poignant games I've ever played, and the thrill of leaping onto a giant monster as it soars through the air and then hanging on for dear life is a great experience. And it's one of those games that you really need to play first hand, you could watch someone play a cutscene heavy game like the Metal Gear Solid series and get most of the experience but SotC should be played, and it requires quite a bit of dexterity to do so.
90 minutes is pretty good, WASD + keyboard took hours and hours to get used to. Using the mouse to look around was such a bizarre concept that when Quake came out you had to hold down a key to look around. It took years for the WASD keyboard setup to become standard (it wasn't until around when Quake 2 is when it became the default).
I like it too, while Vaan and Penelo are typical teenage Final Fantasy characters, the rest of the cast has a very "western" feel to them, Balthier and Basch would be at home in Oblivion. While I like the characters, have you noticed all the parallels to Star Wars? Like this was inspired from another forum:
Vaan - Luke
Ashe - Leia
Balthier - Han Solo
Fran - Chewie
Basch - Aragorn (okay two sources)
Judge - Darth Vader
Bounty Hunter Bangaa - Boba Fett
At one point in the game you even visit a "Cloud City" type place that is being tolerated by the "Empire" and run by someone who may or may not be working for them.
There are about 16'000 different PS1 and PS2 titles, counting all regions... source.
Tell me about it, I got this external USB drive and I was looking at the instructions and I'm not sure what "u can whop the USBcable from the USB port" means... External USB hard disk manual.
I've been assuming Apple was just paying people to hang out in trendy coffee shops with Macbooks.
They're making it more difficult because they want you to rebuy all your stuff on iTunes and the like, not rip stuff you already have. They want to consumers to get frustrated and say "Guess I'll have to buy The White Album again." Though I agree that alienation is more likely.
They should bring back the turbo button. Yeah I know it was for compatibility not heat control but it would still be nice to have.
There is a very good reason for not raising prices, if the Wii or the PS3 was priced higher, then while those companies would make more money, some people would be turned off by the high price and buy an XBOX 360. And once someone already owns a 360 they are less likely to buy another console in the future because of the investment. By pricing the PS3 and Wii lower than demand, instead of buying a 360 people may wait for the other consoles to become available. Also, optimal pricing is hard to predict, like the 360 in Japan (which got a small fraction of consoles compared to North America) and the PSP didn't sell out at launch.
While I'd like to see more detailed data, the conclusion seems plausible enough. But I'm curious about the long term effect of bad reviews on a franchise. For example, games like Driv3r and Enter the Matrix may have sold really well despite bad reviews, but if a game is bad people aren't going to buy the sequel, the frachise has been badly tarnished, and I don't think Driver 4 or Path of Neo sold that well (I may be wrong though). Tomb Raider is another franchise that used to be really huge but got tarnished by bad sequels. Acclaim Entertainment killed themselves with too many bad games.
It's may not be, the HP thing has been big news lately because there's debate as to wether it is covered by law, it's not clear if pretexting phone records is illegal since it's "non-financial" information.
Agree with you almost %100 (I thought Superman Returns was so-so) but last year and this year there have been some other great films like Squid and the Whale, Grizzly Man, Nobody Knows, Lady Vengence, my favourite film of last year A Bittersweet Life, and some really good martial arts films in District 13 and SPL. And there are still a lot films that I haven't had time to get around to yet like Cache, V for Vendetta, Scanner Darkly... I'd say there are too many good films out there.
If Matt Groening can get rich from creating the Simpsons I don't see why not the same thing could happen in the future with someone who creates some popular CG characters, it'll probably be rare though.
It's entirely possible it was left in accidently, people with hex editors find stuff left over from earlier builds all the time in games. For example, Bioware got criticism for Kotor II when people found dialogue from a more elaborate ending left in the game (suggesting the game was rushed) and a Japanese preview demo for the game Xenosaga III accidently included all the dialogue for the game. Those weren't Easter Eggs, that was stuff that the companies wished they hadn't released.
On a related note, I read an interview with the people behind Indigo Prophecy were they said they had to take extra care to make sure none of the code for the uncensored European release was in the American version. Normally you would could REM out some code but because of the Hot Coffee incident they had to make a more thorough audit of the code.
Even though I think this got blown way out of proportion, I'm very curious to what really happened.
and then shoehorning in the most forced "OMGZ, I've been hunting you as a serial killer suspect for the last couple of weeks, and even though we've only ever spoken TWICE I now want to jump your cold, dead, zombie bones so we can have a zombie love-child convenient to the hackneyed plot!"
I have this theory that everything that happens to Lucas after he falls off that roller coaster and "dies" is a sort of dream of his, where he fantasizes about being reborn and having sex with the woman investigating him and having super powers. Sorta like the film "Minority Report", where some people think that the reality of the plot ends when Tom Cruise's character is imprisoned.