They need to add WiFi to it, set to trigger 5 pounds of plastic explosives under the driver's seat of any fratboy that gets behind the wheel after playing.
I'm getting really fucking tired of the de-facto acceptance of drunk driving in some circles.
I can totally understand HP's position on this. Selling the iPod doesn't fit into their current corporate strategy of offering products that absolutely nobody wants.
" Levine calls the phenomenon visual motor ecstasy, where any cultural accoutrement that doesn't produce instant satisfaction is boring. As echo boomers grow up, they'll have to learn that life is not just a series of headlines and highlight reels ".
Sadly, this attitude is being reflected in gaming today. I constantly hear game developers say that their audience wants pick-up-and-play titles that require no learning curve, provide instant satisfaction and are short to boot.
Of course, the fact that titles like Morrowind sell millions is ignored and we get less depth, less gameplay and more on-the-rails-hurry-up-and-win crap.
The beleif seems to be that you either want the 5 hour long game "Happy Fun Shiny Things" or the endless, pointless grind of "Evercrack". Those of us trapped in the middle are getting fewer and fewer games geared towards us. Something like another game with the gameplay elements and quality of Deus Ex becomes a more and more remote possibility by the day.
When the PATRIOT Act was first proposed a lot of people - myself included - saw it for what it was after momentarily putting aside the shock and unreal horror of 9/11.
Thus, the following exchange occurred many times with many different people.
Me: "So you're saying that you think this whole thing might be a bad idea in the long run?"
Them: "Yeah, but don't worry, everything sunsets in five years. The bill will expire and by that point the threat will have diminished to the point where it won't be needed any longer. Chill man. Stop being a Chicken Little about things."
Me: "Don't you realize that once the government gets more power that they are very unlikely to ever give it up again? Do you understand how many times this sort of thing has happened, where temporary measures such as taxes to fund wars, emergency powers and the like end up going on forever?
Them: "You have to wake up to this post -9/11 world we live in now. Things are different, we have to win this war on terrorism!"
Me: "How do you win a war against a tactic? Terrorism is here to stay, and if you let this bill come into law then it will be here to stay. There is zero doubt that reason will be found to keep it and use it as justification for further restrictive bills. Once the ball is rolling on this, it will be more or less impossible to stop."
Them: "Not more of that liberal alarmist BS..."
I had that conversation about 50,000 times, I'm sure many of you did as well. The cliche of a "slippery slope" is a cliche because it so often proves to be true. The PATRIOT Act was never going to expire and never will. Terrorism is too nebulous of a threat to ever go away. It can be brought out indefinitely to justify the permanence of such legislation, regardless of wether it is a truly valuable tool and one that respects the rights of all those who fall under its jurisdiction.
The rumblings of what comes after the PATRIOT Act have been a troubling sight on the horizon for the past few years now. Drafts have been circulated on Capitol Hill. They contain such provisions as being stripped of your natural-born citizenship by executive order upon being deemed an "enemy combatant" and various other items that you can read up on at non-tinfoil sites out there.
I'm not gloating that I was proved right. I'm depressed. I wanted little more than to see 2005 close with the likes of the PATRIOT Act in the rearview. To wake up from the nightmare that we've all descended into. The nightmare that is the kind of world we saw dawn on a September morning almost 4 years ago. Sheer unimaginable brutality delivered by surprise along the sense that worse was yet to come at some point, while we were forced to watch those we had entrusted with our safety play politics with it and make the power grabs that we have always dismissed as fantasies of lunatics on the fringes of society.
The actions of Al-Queda and governments around the world in response, were both examples of dramatic and unexpected reactions to external influences. Hoping that they were an aberration proved to be futile. They are now the new norm.
I think at this time the only thing that I can really say is that when the government pushes more legislation and word starts getting around about a new bill coming through the pipe, do not dismiss it with the usual "It will never get out of committee" or the equally as overused "It will never pass."
If by now, you haven't learned to grasp that you need to expect the unexpected, then the next 5 years look like they will be quite a ride for you.
I think a lot of fans of the space program (and NASA employees as well) would love to see all of the Shuttles just fall apart in storage ala the Bluesmobile at the end of The Blues Brothers
Sadly, that will not happen, and any damage sustained during a flight would give more ammunition to those who believe NASA's funding should be eliminated altogether (or at least the funding for the manned side of things).
Another accident would simply doom the organization. When Challenger was lost, NASA was allowed some breathing room to rework itself as an organization. When Columbia disintegrated, it was the death knell for the shuttle program much sooner than anyone could have expected or hoped for. Anything else at this point, would likely put the entire organization back another 10 years, if they were even allowed to fly people up again.
NASA is running on its last chance here. All of the remaining shuttles will be decommissioned in 5 years. Period. The CEV is being worked on at an accelerated pace. No more of the "Yeah, that one part failed during a test and it will take 18 months to fabricate a new one, so everyone involved with the project can sit on their hands while we make this thing" like we had with the previous attempts to remaking the shuttle without really having technology ready to see it through.
Some would like to argue that private industry could do manned exploration better. I'm sure they could do launches quite nicely, but no company is anywhere close to having an orbital craft. And good luck on finding me a private company that will drop a few billion on pure research for the sake of knowing more about our galaxy.
I've played PC (this includes Commodore 64, Amiga, x86 PC and Mac) games for years. Recently however, I've found myself paying more attention to console games because I simply cannot afford to pay for the hardware, the games and the hardware upgrades to keep playing new games.
More and more, I've become aware that many people are in the same boat as I am. Opting to buy a console that costs about as much as a video card once every 4 years as opposed to swapping out components on a regular basis.
Now this brings me to my point. We've all read how console gamers prefer "pick up and play" titles that are shallow and addictive, while PC gamers prefer "deeper" and more involving games.
With the statistics showing PC gamers spending more time on their consoles, does that indicate that they are necessarily endorsing the traditional console game stereotype and eschewing more complicated titles deliberately, or is the state of PC hardware with regard to gaming the primary motivator?
Is the image of what a console game is and is not valid any longer when you have a mass migration from the PC? Or does the presence of former PC gamers reenforce it?
In interviews and articles, I've read much on how many gamers want short, simple games that only require a minimal investment of time each play period. With schedules becoming more and more demanding these days, it is understandable, but we seem to be seeing a dearth of titles between the "Short and Simple" categories and the "Evercrack Level-Grind" style.
With the former style being the stereotypical console game, and more gamers moving to consoles, I would hope that developers do not simply abandon those of us who made the switch for reasons other than a desire to change our preferred game type.
The fact is, there are countless titles on consoles already (and in development) that cater to the "pick up and play" crowd. The rest of us have little to choose from. The casual market is being catered to quite nicely. Now for the rest of us platform immigrants.
We want our Deus Ex, Morrowind, etc level of complexity, depth and quality, but we don't want to spend hundreds keeping up with the PC hardware race.
This is why I bitch and moan whenever someone tells me that "such and such game gives you too much freedom and should be more on the rails" (which I get more than you might imagine). There are already tons and tons of games that suit the player who would find walking around Vvanderfell uninteresting. For those of us who like it, there isn't much to choose from. Let us have our games the way we like them and don't insist that every game conform to this new standard that is already saturating the market.
Will developers recognize that "streamlining" gameplay and making it more "accessible" (which usually means "make it more arcade-like and rip out the depth, no matter how much fun it is") could very well be turning off a segment of their potential market?
Every few months, a new technical feature designed to improve the visual look of the desktop, migrates over from OS X or Windows some time after it was originally implemented there.
The feature adds some visual flourish and like clockwork, the chorus rings out: "Now Linux looks more like OS X/Windows, we are that much closer to being ready for the desktop!"
I would like to say that's true, but it's far from it. The notion so often expressed in the OSS community that the superficial appearance of the user interface is the primary stumbling block on the road to feature parity, is absolute nonsense.
The functionality remains absolutely ridiculously inconsistent - even by Microsoft standards. The user is assaulted with a constant mish-mash of UI philosophies from one program to another, most of which are cooked up on the spot by whomever coded that portion of the app.
The features do not make the interface, the methods in which you employ them are.
To move beyond this issue, the OSS community will have to conquer the much broader problem of "If you don't like it, code it yourself!" There needs to be a broad understanding that the users are vitally important and that you are not doing some great favor to them by "letting" them use what you've coded. What works for them first, what works for you second. That's the way it needs to be. The bruising of egos will be immense, I know. However, non-expert users will reject Linux otherwise.
If Linux makes a big splash on the desktop and then suffers mass rejection, the recovery will be difficult if not impossible. "Use it because it's cheaper. isn't enough. U.S. carmakers tried that with their half-assed diesel models they rushed into showrooms shortly after the oil embargo of the 1970s. It became clear that the cars were simply under-engineered and the diesel market was shoved into a tiny niche from then on. An enormous amount of effort has been placed in the uphill climb to change perceptions ever since.
I would hardly call the universe of Morrowind "another world just like this one". It is about as different as you could imagine. The people, the geography, the presence of magic and even the foliage is strange and new.
I find this highly entertaining.
As for your basic criticism of game worlds that resemble our own, I will have to agree to disagree on that one. What I consider enjoyable is being able to do things in games that I would never have the opportunity to do in real life. Often times I've wished that I could save, try something out and go back to my save again and do things differently the next time.
Obviously you cannot do that in real life, but immersive, non-linear games set in realistic surroundings offer that. Life is too short to explore even the slightest fraction of possibilities of the world around us. No matter how much we would like to do some things, they will never happen and in many cases, should never happen.
Non-linear, freeform worlds give us all the chance to overcome the deficiencies of space and time and really make our dreams and some of our darkest fantasies come true. I find them entertaining and millions of others do, too.
What tends to bother me is when some gamers get angry at non-linear games and demand the next version be more on-the-rails. There are thousands of linear games out there worth playing, there are only a very, very small number that give you real freedom. I don't see why they need to feel so threatened by games like Morrowind.
As you said, a lot of this stuff is being fixed In Oblivion. For example, if you do something like clear out a dungeon and show up in a town a few days later, you will hear people talking about your exploits and they will act differently towards you.
I have faith in Bethesda to make all of these features actually work.
I never understood how people got "lost" in Morrowind. From the moment you get off the ship, they tell you where to go and who you need to see to begin the main quest. All of the other quests are pretty self-explanitory, despite the fact they are not presented on a sliver platter. There is some work involved and that seems to throw some gamers off.
Far more people are used to "On-The-Rails" RPGs, where you must do this, then this then this, etc. Playing a game like Morrowind requires a mentality shift. The game is not in control of the experience, you are. I firmly believe that is the better type of game, but opinions differ.
The problem I see is that for too many gamers, the goals must be rammed down their throats before they can do anything. To suddenly say "Hey, we've created this entire world, have fun!" is too much for them to deal with. Not because they are stupid, but because it is so vastly alien to them.
Personally, I will be far less likely to buy an "On-The Rails" game because it is too frustrating. I have this great world around me, but it is very much like being on a train. I can see all of the potential, but everything is predestined. No getting off to enjoy the scenery and explore the world rushing past my window. I must fight this guy, I must go here...I get pissed. If I wanted to be led around, I would have put in a DVD movie instead. I want to go off on my own and do my own thing.
With Morrowind, I can slip in and out of the main plot at will, or ignore it completely. There is no forced-anything. From the moment I walk out into Seyda Neen, the options are virtually limitless. I can go anywhere, do anything and be any kind of character that I want to.
Choice is good, replayability is fantastic and having the opportunity to simply walk away for a while and pick up right back where I was in my "other life" is priceless. I've done marathon sessions before, but only because I've had a night where I had nothing better to do. You get sucked so far into the game and your character, but unlike Everquest and World Of Warcraft, myself (and other Morrowind fans that I know) find it very easy to put the controller down and not let it consume our real lives.
Being able to not just live one adventure, but continue on a lifetime of them, without it getting in the way of everything else (or costing money every month) just can't be beat.
Never being the FPS partisan, I've found it extremely easy to enjoy a variety of games from a variety of developers because the fanboy trap was something I never wanted to fall into. You simply end up denying yourself too many good games that way.
We all know how difficult it can be to sort through the junk and find the real gaming jewels, so I see no point in going into something intended to be relaxing and enjoyable as gaming with a ton of prejudices. (Though I do make a lighthearted crack about the new cutscene collection being released when I see a PS2 RPG released, but I digress...)
I grew up on Wolf3D, Doom, Quake and Unreal. Enjoying them all, I was slightly disappointed when I discovered the next generation of games were going to be online-only. Sure, you could play the maps against bots, but that really isn't the same as a nice adventure through some hellish landscape.
Quake3Test had some issues with my computer, so I played the demo for Unreal Tournament instead. The demo stands to this day as one of the best demos for any kind of game on any platform...ever. They didn't give you a crippled experience, they didn't give you two maps and say "That's it", the developers instead adopted the philosophy that if you wow the shit out of people, they will buy your game. As opposed to the "Oops, you've been playing the demo for 3 seconds and have 1% of the features working, time to stop playing! Goodbye!" crap you so often get to this day.
Sure, there were features disabled, but they were minor. All of the basic stuff was there for free. To make things even better, the game was quite a step up from the online FPSs I had played previous. UT offered a multitude of new game modes and the maps all felt unique and very, very different from one another.
Fast forward a little bit and I start playing Quake 3: Arena. Things look nicer than they ever have, and the performance is superb even on my low-end machine. Then it hits me...it looks just a little too much like Quakes past. The maps, the textures...all of it seems like ground that id has covered before.
The id vs. Epic fanboys had escalated their rhetoric into near full-scale war by this point and I tried to stay above the fray. Not wishing to get involved in the flaming, I quietly stopped involving myself in discussions about it. I knew something had changed though, UT had clearly (in my mind) offered much, much more than Quake 3 in the gameplay department from the get-go.
From then on it seemed like id was never able to achieve the same level of quality in the content department. As I was told by many, their primary concern was the engine. However, when company had gone from offering so much across the board to a narrowly-focused operation that seemed to put out games just good enough to sell their impressive engines, it just left me feeling like something was lost. A design sensibility that I missed.
This is not exactly a good thing
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Sci-Fi on the Cheap
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Here you have one very good reason why SciFi as a genre, is not taken seriously by most people over the age of 12.
I enjoy a good number of B-Movies (and even a few C and D-list films), but I get worried when the predominant type of movie being produced is deliberately low-brow and sets the bar so low in fact, a first year film student could trip over it.
The idea that SciFi can be well-written and produced with some care is hard for many people to accept these days, as all they see is schlock put together on the cheap as fast as humanly possible to give the channel in question a quick cash infusion
In a day when even comic books and fantasy novels are taken seriously by the masses due to the amount of effort put into adapting them to the screen, it nearly brings a tear to my eye to consider that the bargain-bin product coming from The SciFi Channel is pretty much the cream of the crop these days.
I really don't know what I would do if a studio announced they were hiring an extremely adept filmmaker and screenwriter to put The Foundation series into theatres.
"I wonder if Apple will reconsider the decision regarding the migration."
After the WWDC and the trauma it inflicted on some devs, I find it highly unlikely that Apple is going to suddenly decide tomorrow that they've made a bad move and are going to stick with the PPC path in the future. Apple knew this G5 development was coming, hence the comment that has been repeated numerous times that the next 2 years are going to produce some interesting developments in the PPC platform, but by 2007, things will be at a point where Intel will overtake them and that the PPC roadmap does not offer anything that can keep up with the pace of Intel. Jumping hardware platforms is hard enough as it is, jumping back would work to obliterate the confidence that Steve Jobs has tried to instill in those who support the Mac. He and his fellow execs are trying very, very hard to appear as if this is really worth it and that they have a solid plan that will not leave 3rd parties burned.
Nobody wants to have another Amiga situation, where every week there is a new roadmap to follow, dramatically different than the one before. That is the perfect way to scare off the community that keeps a platform going.
Unfortunately, while T-Mobile treats some customers extremely well, they have locked-down their flagship Sidekick 2 (Hiptop) phone hard while at the same time refusing to let SK2 users access their general ringtone repository. The SK2 ringtone selection is beyond anemic and is rarely updated. We are lucky to get 10 tones a month, and most of them are rap.
They fail to see how they are alienating their userbase and throwing potential profit out of the window. Customers actually want to give them money for the products they have in their possession (the ringtones) but T-Mobile will not grant them the "privilege" of purchasing them.
Don't get me started on the selection of apps (T-Mobile locks them out as well and new ones are rare as hen's teeth)....
Papa Johns would get even more business if they introduced a unified online payment system. I rarely carry cash and there are many times when I would have ordered a pizza from them, but in my city of 650,000 people you can choose Cash, Check or their "Papa Card" which is not something I want to bother signing up for. I would rather use my Visa check card and pay with real money as opposed to racking up even more debt when I don't have to.
They offer more payment choices elsewhere, but they really should work a bit harder on offering them on a wider scale. I started using their website for ordering several years ago, and while everything else on their site is perfect with regard to ordering, they really need to get on the ball with this one thing.
I just don't see subscription based services supplanting the per-track download sites. The all-you-can-eat concept is compelling at first, but I think people want to be left with something when they inevitably cancel their subscriptions.
The concept of renting movies has been accepted because most people are OK with watching a particular film once every great while. When it comes to music, people want to hold onto what they get, burn it, move it onto portable devices, and have ready access to it at all Times. Once they have handed over some cash they believe they have paid for that right. The sub services almost universally demand more per track on top of the other fees to do what iTunes offers for a one-time charge $.99.
I haven't sent a dime Apple's way since April. I just haven't found anything worth buying while money is tight for me. I can't imagine having my entire collection disappear and all of the money I have spent utterly negated because of that lapse.
No, they've been -announced-; Neither Microsoft nor Sony have anything resembling a product ready to ship. They didn't even do the E3 demos on real hardware. Point two, Apple won't be making intel systems till 2007, when it is likely PPC systems will continue in some lines. They didn't say "in 2007 we will completely switch".
After E3, Microsoft is not going to suddenly abandon the PPC before the 360 is launched.
Furthermore, Steve Jobs said the first Intel Macs will arrive by next June and the transition will be complete by 2007.
- Half Life 2 released - Microsoft switch their flagship product to PPC - Apple switch to x86 - The revelation of Deep Throat's identity - The release of Sarge
Hell has frozen over and pigs are flying.
Come on George Broussard..I know you are reading this..just give us some screenshots and let the universe implode entirely.
If anything, commercial backing helps keep projects focused. One of the great things about OSS is that anyone can start a project, however far too often you end up with 10 separate understaffed projects all working on the same goal and in many cases the differences could be bridged, but everyone wants things done absolutely their way. In the end, development drags on, everything takes longer than it should and the product suffers.
When you have a abundant resources and effective project management things can often turn out better in the end. The community loses nothing and everybody wins. The corporation receives a top-quality product in a timely fashion and the community receives some excellent source. OSS is further legitimized in the corporate world - which is absolutely necessary in getting anyone to even consider abandoning Microsoft - and more OSS programmers get jobs where what they do during the day helps the side-projects they work on in the evening.
One thing I noticed about the Trek movies is that the ones that really made you feel as if there was this huge universe out there around the characters brought in the most money at the box office. The size of the canvas seemed to be proportional to the size of the returns.
The problem with movies like Insurrection and Nemesis - to name a few - was that in the end it was one ship vs one ship and the whole feeling of this bustling galaxy filled with all sorts of different characters was gone. Sure, the Enterprise alone verses the Scimitar was pretty cool, but the whole movie never developed that sense of grand adventure that The Wrath Of Kahn (which mixed the isolation of the Enterprise in latter parts with a much wider view of things early on), First Contact or The Undiscovered Country had. The scope of the universe seemed to be scaled-down to TNG-episode proportions. Insurrection was arguably the worst at this - the whole thing felt like a 2 part TNG from one of the latter seasons.
To borrow a line from a song, Nintendo is "glorifying their past while the future dries up."
Banking primarily on your past catalog is something that tired old rock stars do when they can't hit the notes, write the songs, or bring in the fans anymore with something new. While I understand there's a lot of well-deserved goodwill towards Nintendo's old titles, at some point you have to look ahead and re-releasing and rehashing over and over again isn't innovative and it sure as hell isn't revolutionary.
Nintendo said that many developers would be turned-off by their new console and I can see why. It is designed to promote their back catalog above all else. They are the has-beens of the console world and would rather focus on the latest repackaged "Greatest Hits" collection than dare to even try something new.
When it comes down to a choice between Super Mario Bros 2 or playing Mario 45 and Zelda 37, you can't expect to be seen as doing anything but spinning your wheels.
The Xbox Live Arcade will offer old games up for download as well. Microsoft views it as icing on the cake and not the Be-All, End-All of gaming and a pinnacle of innovation that will change everything.
".....most of Mr Iwata's speech, entitled "The Heart of the Gamer", was a call for more imaginative game design."
Does this mean Nintendo will stop focusing on rehashing the same franchises (and in the case of it's handhelds) the same games year after year?
I know that there are a lot of fans of the franchises out there, but it seems that Mario, Wario, Pokemon, Zelda, et al are really the only thing Nintendo cares about, and this combined with their lackluster attitude towards third-parties increasingly makes their systems a less and less attractive investment.
I certainly hope the new console is a "revolution" and that their next handheld system offers something a bit more than "The same, exact games you played on the last Game Boy....sold to you again!"
Slashdot Mirror
They need to add WiFi to it, set to trigger 5 pounds of plastic explosives under the driver's seat of any fratboy that gets behind the wheel after playing.
I'm getting really fucking tired of the de-facto acceptance of drunk driving in some circles.
I can totally understand HP's position on this. Selling the iPod doesn't fit into their current corporate strategy of offering products that absolutely nobody wants.
" Levine calls the phenomenon visual motor ecstasy, where any cultural accoutrement that doesn't produce instant satisfaction is boring. As echo boomers grow up, they'll have to learn that life is not just a series of headlines and highlight reels ".
Sadly, this attitude is being reflected in gaming today. I constantly hear game developers say that their audience wants pick-up-and-play titles that require no learning curve, provide instant satisfaction and are short to boot.
Of course, the fact that titles like Morrowind sell millions is ignored and we get less depth, less gameplay and more on-the-rails-hurry-up-and-win crap.
The beleif seems to be that you either want the 5 hour long game "Happy Fun Shiny Things" or the endless, pointless grind of "Evercrack". Those of us trapped in the middle are getting fewer and fewer games geared towards us. Something like another game with the gameplay elements and quality of Deus Ex becomes a more and more remote possibility by the day.
When the PATRIOT Act was first proposed a lot of people - myself included - saw it for what it was after momentarily putting aside the shock and unreal horror of 9/11.
Thus, the following exchange occurred many times with many different people.
Me: "So you're saying that you think this whole thing might be a bad idea in the long run?"
Them: "Yeah, but don't worry, everything sunsets in five years. The bill will expire and by that point the threat will have diminished to the point where it won't be needed any longer. Chill man. Stop being a Chicken Little about things."
Me: "Don't you realize that once the government gets more power that they are very unlikely to ever give it up again? Do you understand how many times this sort of thing has happened, where temporary measures such as taxes to fund wars, emergency powers and the like end up going on forever?
Them: "You have to wake up to this post -9/11 world we live in now. Things are different, we have to win this war on terrorism!"
Me: "How do you win a war against a tactic? Terrorism is here to stay, and if you let this bill come into law then it will be here to stay. There is zero doubt that reason will be found to keep it and use it as justification for further restrictive bills. Once the ball is rolling on this, it will be more or less impossible to stop."
Them: "Not more of that liberal alarmist BS..."
I had that conversation about 50,000 times, I'm sure many of you did as well. The cliche of a "slippery slope" is a cliche because it so often proves to be true. The PATRIOT Act was never going to expire and never will. Terrorism is too nebulous of a threat to ever go away. It can be brought out indefinitely to justify the permanence of such legislation, regardless of wether it is a truly valuable tool and one that respects the rights of all those who fall under its jurisdiction.
The rumblings of what comes after the PATRIOT Act have been a troubling sight on the horizon for the past few years now. Drafts have been circulated on Capitol Hill. They contain such provisions as being stripped of your natural-born citizenship by executive order upon being deemed an "enemy combatant" and various other items that you can read up on at non-tinfoil sites out there.
I'm not gloating that I was proved right. I'm depressed. I wanted little more than to see 2005 close with the likes of the PATRIOT Act in the rearview. To wake up from the nightmare that we've all descended into. The nightmare that is the kind of world we saw dawn on a September morning almost 4 years ago. Sheer unimaginable brutality delivered by surprise along the sense that worse was yet to come at some point, while we were forced to watch those we had entrusted with our safety play politics with it and make the power grabs that we have always dismissed as fantasies of lunatics on the fringes of society.
The actions of Al-Queda and governments around the world in response, were both examples of dramatic and unexpected reactions to external influences. Hoping that they were an aberration proved to be futile. They are now the new norm.
I think at this time the only thing that I can really say is that when the government pushes more legislation and word starts getting around about a new bill coming through the pipe, do not dismiss it with the usual "It will never get out of committee" or the equally as overused "It will never pass."
If by now, you haven't learned to grasp that you need to expect the unexpected, then the next 5 years look like they will be quite a ride for you.
Ummm....I'm a U.S. iTunes user and I have "Sgt Peppers" sitting in my shopping cart right now.
I think a lot of fans of the space program (and NASA employees as well) would love to see all of the Shuttles just fall apart in storage ala the Bluesmobile at the end of The Blues Brothers
Sadly, that will not happen, and any damage sustained during a flight would give more ammunition to those who believe NASA's funding should be eliminated altogether (or at least the funding for the manned side of things).
Another accident would simply doom the organization. When Challenger was lost, NASA was allowed some breathing room to rework itself as an organization. When Columbia disintegrated, it was the death knell for the shuttle program much sooner than anyone could have expected or hoped for. Anything else at this point, would likely put the entire organization back another 10 years, if they were even allowed to fly people up again.
NASA is running on its last chance here. All of the remaining shuttles will be decommissioned in 5 years. Period. The CEV is being worked on at an accelerated pace. No more of the "Yeah, that one part failed during a test and it will take 18 months to fabricate a new one, so everyone involved with the project can sit on their hands while we make this thing" like we had with the previous attempts to remaking the shuttle without really having technology ready to see it through.
Some would like to argue that private industry could do manned exploration better. I'm sure they could do launches quite nicely, but no company is anywhere close to having an orbital craft. And good luck on finding me a private company that will drop a few billion on pure research for the sake of knowing more about our galaxy.
I've played PC (this includes Commodore 64, Amiga, x86 PC and Mac) games for years. Recently however, I've found myself paying more attention to console games because I simply cannot afford to pay for the hardware, the games and the hardware upgrades to keep playing new games.
More and more, I've become aware that many people are in the same boat as I am. Opting to buy a console that costs about as much as a video card once every 4 years as opposed to swapping out components on a regular basis.
Now this brings me to my point. We've all read how console gamers prefer "pick up and play" titles that are shallow and addictive, while PC gamers prefer "deeper" and more involving games.
With the statistics showing PC gamers spending more time on their consoles, does that indicate that they are necessarily endorsing the traditional console game stereotype and eschewing more complicated titles deliberately, or is the state of PC hardware with regard to gaming the primary motivator?
Is the image of what a console game is and is not valid any longer when you have a mass migration from the PC? Or does the presence of former PC gamers reenforce it?
In interviews and articles, I've read much on how many gamers want short, simple games that only require a minimal investment of time each play period. With schedules becoming more and more demanding these days, it is understandable, but we seem to be seeing a dearth of titles between the "Short and Simple" categories and the "Evercrack Level-Grind" style.
With the former style being the stereotypical console game, and more gamers moving to consoles, I would hope that developers do not simply abandon those of us who made the switch for reasons other than a desire to change our preferred game type.
The fact is, there are countless titles on consoles already (and in development) that cater to the "pick up and play" crowd. The rest of us have little to choose from. The casual market is being catered to quite nicely. Now for the rest of us platform immigrants.
We want our Deus Ex, Morrowind, etc level of complexity, depth and quality, but we don't want to spend hundreds keeping up with the PC hardware race.
This is why I bitch and moan whenever someone tells me that "such and such game gives you too much freedom and should be more on the rails" (which I get more than you might imagine). There are already tons and tons of games that suit the player who would find walking around Vvanderfell uninteresting. For those of us who like it, there isn't much to choose from. Let us have our games the way we like them and don't insist that every game conform to this new standard that is already saturating the market.
Will developers recognize that "streamlining" gameplay and making it more "accessible" (which usually means "make it more arcade-like and rip out the depth, no matter how much fun it is") could very well be turning off a segment of their potential market?
Every few months, a new technical feature designed to improve the visual look of the desktop, migrates over from OS X or Windows some time after it was originally implemented there.
The feature adds some visual flourish and like clockwork, the chorus rings out: "Now Linux looks more like OS X/Windows, we are that much closer to being ready for the desktop!"
I would like to say that's true, but it's far from it. The notion so often expressed in the OSS community that the superficial appearance of the user interface is the primary stumbling block on the road to feature parity, is absolute nonsense.
The functionality remains absolutely ridiculously inconsistent - even by Microsoft standards. The user is assaulted with a constant mish-mash of UI philosophies from one program to another, most of which are cooked up on the spot by whomever coded that portion of the app.
The features do not make the interface, the methods in which you employ them are.
To move beyond this issue, the OSS community will have to conquer the much broader problem of "If you don't like it, code it yourself!" There needs to be a broad understanding that the users are vitally important and that you are not doing some great favor to them by "letting" them use what you've coded. What works for them first, what works for you second. That's the way it needs to be. The bruising of egos will be immense, I know. However, non-expert users will reject Linux otherwise.
If Linux makes a big splash on the desktop and then suffers mass rejection, the recovery will be difficult if not impossible. "Use it because it's cheaper. isn't enough. U.S. carmakers tried that with their half-assed diesel models they rushed into showrooms shortly after the oil embargo of the 1970s. It became clear that the cars were simply under-engineered and the diesel market was shoved into a tiny niche from then on. An enormous amount of effort has been placed in the uphill climb to change perceptions ever since.
Don't let it happen here.
I would hardly call the universe of Morrowind "another world just like this one". It is about as different as you could imagine. The people, the geography, the presence of magic and even the foliage is strange and new.
I find this highly entertaining.
As for your basic criticism of game worlds that resemble our own, I will have to agree to disagree on that one. What I consider enjoyable is being able to do things in games that I would never have the opportunity to do in real life. Often times I've wished that I could save, try something out and go back to my save again and do things differently the next time.
Obviously you cannot do that in real life, but immersive, non-linear games set in realistic surroundings offer that. Life is too short to explore even the slightest fraction of possibilities of the world around us. No matter how much we would like to do some things, they will never happen and in many cases, should never happen.
Non-linear, freeform worlds give us all the chance to overcome the deficiencies of space and time and really make our dreams and some of our darkest fantasies come true. I find them entertaining and millions of others do, too.
What tends to bother me is when some gamers get angry at non-linear games and demand the next version be more on-the-rails. There are thousands of linear games out there worth playing, there are only a very, very small number that give you real freedom. I don't see why they need to feel so threatened by games like Morrowind.
Anyway, I'll stop babbling now.
As you said, a lot of this stuff is being fixed In Oblivion. For example, if you do something like clear out a dungeon and show up in a town a few days later, you will hear people talking about your exploits and they will act differently towards you.
I have faith in Bethesda to make all of these features actually work.
I never understood how people got "lost" in Morrowind. From the moment you get off the ship, they tell you where to go and who you need to see to begin the main quest. All of the other quests are pretty self-explanitory, despite the fact they are not presented on a sliver platter. There is some work involved and that seems to throw some gamers off.
Far more people are used to "On-The-Rails" RPGs, where you must do this, then this then this, etc. Playing a game like Morrowind requires a mentality shift. The game is not in control of the experience, you are. I firmly believe that is the better type of game, but opinions differ.
The problem I see is that for too many gamers, the goals must be rammed down their throats before they can do anything. To suddenly say "Hey, we've created this entire world, have fun!" is too much for them to deal with. Not because they are stupid, but because it is so vastly alien to them.
Personally, I will be far less likely to buy an "On-The Rails" game because it is too frustrating. I have this great world around me, but it is very much like being on a train. I can see all of the potential, but everything is predestined. No getting off to enjoy the scenery and explore the world rushing past my window. I must fight this guy, I must go here...I get pissed. If I wanted to be led around, I would have put in a DVD movie instead. I want to go off on my own and do my own thing.
With Morrowind, I can slip in and out of the main plot at will, or ignore it completely. There is no forced-anything. From the moment I walk out into Seyda Neen, the options are virtually limitless. I can go anywhere, do anything and be any kind of character that I want to.
Choice is good, replayability is fantastic and having the opportunity to simply walk away for a while and pick up right back where I was in my "other life" is priceless. I've done marathon sessions before, but only because I've had a night where I had nothing better to do. You get sucked so far into the game and your character, but unlike Everquest and World Of Warcraft, myself (and other Morrowind fans that I know) find it very easy to put the controller down and not let it consume our real lives.
Being able to not just live one adventure, but continue on a lifetime of them, without it getting in the way of everything else (or costing money every month) just can't be beat.
Never being the FPS partisan, I've found it extremely easy to enjoy a variety of games from a variety of developers because the fanboy trap was something I never wanted to fall into. You simply end up denying yourself too many good games that way.
We all know how difficult it can be to sort through the junk and find the real gaming jewels, so I see no point in going into something intended to be relaxing and enjoyable as gaming with a ton of prejudices. (Though I do make a lighthearted crack about the new cutscene collection being released when I see a PS2 RPG released, but I digress...)
I grew up on Wolf3D, Doom, Quake and Unreal. Enjoying them all, I was slightly disappointed when I discovered the next generation of games were going to be online-only. Sure, you could play the maps against bots, but that really isn't the same as a nice adventure through some hellish landscape.
Quake3Test had some issues with my computer, so I played the demo for Unreal Tournament instead. The demo stands to this day as one of the best demos for any kind of game on any platform...ever. They didn't give you a crippled experience, they didn't give you two maps and say "That's it", the developers instead adopted the philosophy that if you wow the shit out of people, they will buy your game. As opposed to the "Oops, you've been playing the demo for 3 seconds and have 1% of the features working, time to stop playing! Goodbye!" crap you so often get to this day.
Sure, there were features disabled, but they were minor. All of the basic stuff was there for free. To make things even better, the game was quite a step up from the online FPSs I had played previous. UT offered a multitude of new game modes and the maps all felt unique and very, very different from one another.
Fast forward a little bit and I start playing Quake 3: Arena. Things look nicer than they ever have, and the performance is superb even on my low-end machine. Then it hits me...it looks just a little too much like Quakes past. The maps, the textures...all of it seems like ground that id has covered before.
The id vs. Epic fanboys had escalated their rhetoric into near full-scale war by this point and I tried to stay above the fray. Not wishing to get involved in the flaming, I quietly stopped involving myself in discussions about it. I knew something had changed though, UT had clearly (in my mind) offered much, much more than Quake 3 in the gameplay department from the get-go.
From then on it seemed like id was never able to achieve the same level of quality in the content department. As I was told by many, their primary concern was the engine. However, when company had gone from offering so much across the board to a narrowly-focused operation that seemed to put out games just good enough to sell their impressive engines, it just left me feeling like something was lost. A design sensibility that I missed.
Here you have one very good reason why SciFi as a genre, is not taken seriously by most people over the age of 12.
I enjoy a good number of B-Movies (and even a few C and D-list films), but I get worried when the predominant type of movie being produced is deliberately low-brow and sets the bar so low in fact, a first year film student could trip over it.
The idea that SciFi can be well-written and produced with some care is hard for many people to accept these days, as all they see is schlock put together on the cheap as fast as humanly possible to give the channel in question a quick cash infusion
In a day when even comic books and fantasy novels are taken seriously by the masses due to the amount of effort put into adapting them to the screen, it nearly brings a tear to my eye to consider that the bargain-bin product coming from The SciFi Channel is pretty much the cream of the crop these days.
I really don't know what I would do if a studio announced they were hiring an extremely adept filmmaker and screenwriter to put The Foundation series into theatres.
Probably cry.
"I wonder if Apple will reconsider the decision regarding the migration."
After the WWDC and the trauma it inflicted on some devs, I find it highly unlikely that Apple is going to suddenly decide tomorrow that they've made a bad move and are going to stick with the PPC path in the future. Apple knew this G5 development was coming, hence the comment that has been repeated numerous times that the next 2 years are going to produce some interesting developments in the PPC platform, but by 2007, things will be at a point where Intel will overtake them and that the PPC roadmap does not offer anything that can keep up with the pace of Intel. Jumping hardware platforms is hard enough as it is, jumping back would work to obliterate the confidence that Steve Jobs has tried to instill in those who support the Mac. He and his fellow execs are trying very, very hard to appear as if this is really worth it and that they have a solid plan that will not leave 3rd parties burned.
Nobody wants to have another Amiga situation, where every week there is a new roadmap to follow, dramatically different than the one before. That is the perfect way to scare off the community that keeps a platform going.
Unfortunately, while T-Mobile treats some customers extremely well, they have locked-down their flagship Sidekick 2 (Hiptop) phone hard while at the same time refusing to let SK2 users access their general ringtone repository. The SK2 ringtone selection is beyond anemic and is rarely updated. We are lucky to get 10 tones a month, and most of them are rap.
They fail to see how they are alienating their userbase and throwing potential profit out of the window. Customers actually want to give them money for the products they have in their possession (the ringtones) but T-Mobile will not grant them the "privilege" of purchasing them.
Don't get me started on the selection of apps (T-Mobile locks them out as well and new ones are rare as hen's teeth)....
Papa Johns would get even more business if they introduced a unified online payment system. I rarely carry cash and there are many times when I would have ordered a pizza from them, but in my city of 650,000 people you can choose Cash, Check or their "Papa Card" which is not something I want to bother signing up for. I would rather use my Visa check card and pay with real money as opposed to racking up even more debt when I don't have to.
They offer more payment choices elsewhere, but they really should work a bit harder on offering them on a wider scale. I started using their website for ordering several years ago, and while everything else on their site is perfect with regard to ordering, they really need to get on the ball with this one thing.
I just don't see subscription based services supplanting the per-track download sites. The all-you-can-eat concept is compelling at first, but I think people want to be left with something when they inevitably cancel their subscriptions.
The concept of renting movies has been accepted because most people are OK with watching a particular film once every great while. When it comes to music, people want to hold onto what they get, burn it, move it onto portable devices, and have ready access to it at all Times. Once they have handed over some cash they believe they have paid for that right. The sub services almost universally demand more per track on top of the other fees to do what iTunes offers for a one-time charge $.99.
I haven't sent a dime Apple's way since April. I just haven't found anything worth buying while money is tight for me. I can't imagine having my entire collection disappear and all of the money I have spent utterly negated because of that lapse.
After E3, Microsoft is not going to suddenly abandon the PPC before the 360 is launched.
Furthermore, Steve Jobs said the first Intel Macs will arrive by next June and the transition will be complete by 2007.
In less than a year we have seen:
- Half Life 2 released
- Microsoft switch their flagship product to PPC
- Apple switch to x86
- The revelation of Deep Throat's identity
- The release of Sarge
Hell has frozen over and pigs are flying.
Come on George Broussard..I know you are reading this..just give us some screenshots and let the universe implode entirely.
Everybody knows '28 Days Later' started out as a warning about the dangers of spam.
If anything, commercial backing helps keep projects focused. One of the great things about OSS is that anyone can start a project, however far too often you end up with 10 separate understaffed projects all working on the same goal and in many cases the differences could be bridged, but everyone wants things done absolutely their way. In the end, development drags on, everything takes longer than it should and the product suffers.
When you have a abundant resources and effective project management things can often turn out better in the end. The community loses nothing and everybody wins. The corporation receives a top-quality product in a timely fashion and the community receives some excellent source. OSS is further legitimized in the corporate world - which is absolutely necessary in getting anyone to even consider abandoning Microsoft - and more OSS programmers get jobs where what they do during the day helps the side-projects they work on in the evening.
One thing I noticed about the Trek movies is that the ones that really made you feel as if there was this huge universe out there around the characters brought in the most money at the box office. The size of the canvas seemed to be proportional to the size of the returns.
The problem with movies like Insurrection and Nemesis - to name a few - was that in the end it was one ship vs one ship and the whole feeling of this bustling galaxy filled with all sorts of different characters was gone. Sure, the Enterprise alone verses the Scimitar was pretty cool, but the whole movie never developed that sense of grand adventure that The Wrath Of Kahn (which mixed the isolation of the Enterprise in latter parts with a much wider view of things early on), First Contact or The Undiscovered Country had. The scope of the universe seemed to be scaled-down to TNG-episode proportions. Insurrection was arguably the worst at this - the whole thing felt like a 2 part TNG from one of the latter seasons.
To borrow a line from a song, Nintendo is "glorifying their past while the future dries up."
Banking primarily on your past catalog is something that tired old rock stars do when they can't hit the notes, write the songs, or bring in the fans anymore with something new. While I understand there's a lot of well-deserved goodwill towards Nintendo's old titles, at some point you have to look ahead and re-releasing and rehashing over and over again isn't innovative and it sure as hell isn't revolutionary.
Nintendo said that many developers would be turned-off by their new console and I can see why. It is designed to promote their back catalog above all else. They are the has-beens of the console world and would rather focus on the latest repackaged "Greatest Hits" collection than dare to even try something new.
When it comes down to a choice between Super Mario Bros 2 or playing Mario 45 and Zelda 37, you can't expect to be seen as doing anything but spinning your wheels.
The Xbox Live Arcade will offer old games up for download as well. Microsoft views it as icing on the cake and not the Be-All, End-All of gaming and a pinnacle of innovation that will change everything.
....being that they can get Kate Botello to make a few guest appearances. Then it will be a true reunion.
I know that there are a lot of fans of the franchises out there, but it seems that Mario, Wario, Pokemon, Zelda, et al are really the only thing Nintendo cares about, and this combined with their lackluster attitude towards third-parties increasingly makes their systems a less and less attractive investment.
I certainly hope the new console is a "revolution" and that their next handheld system offers something a bit more than "The same, exact games you played on the last Game Boy....sold to you again!"