So was this Kevin Bachus' "first move" after joining up with Infinium Labs? I don't recall hearing any other action from him since leaving Microsoft.
So, after a couple (few? I forget exactly when he defected) months with the team, the best thing he can come up with to add credibility (wasn't that one of the things he was touted to do?) to the Phantom is to sue a news site for libel and diluting their trademark?
What exactly was he in charge of on the DirectX team, anyway? The patent portfolio?
Or, giving him the benefit of the doubt, maybe calling the phone-in press conference was just the first task Mr. Roberts assigned him to?
It just makes me feel so warm and fuzzy inside when I see all these video game industry "leaders" from Microsoft (Seamus "I want to invent another layer of middle-man!" Blackley in particular) leave, only to be shown for the useless, uninspired jackasses that they are. It's a little harder to survive when they don't have a near limitless supply of cash, eh?
You hate the waste of time that video games are, but your sig is a quote from the Brak Show on Adult Swim?
So, by your logic, it's ok to spend time in front of a screen if you're merely soaking in the entertainment, but not if you're actively engaging in it?
(Of course, maybe you don't watch the Brak Show, and just thought that the quote was funny in its own right. In that case, my bad. But I still think you're full of it.)
Except in this case, the Beatles have absolutely no say in how it's used.
Basically, we're in a society where our culture is being bought up by wealthy individuals and large corporations, and then being sold back to use at highly inflated prices.
I don't think that was the original intent of copyrights.
I am just really hoping that MS doesn't use it's endless coffers to run Nintendo out of business and then give up on the console market because they are not able to make it profitable.
Agreed. I've always felt that the actions and attitudes from key Microsoft players in charge of the XBox reeked of the actions and attitudes of the key execs at Atari at about the time of videogame crash of '84.
I generally tell people, "If you support the XBox, you may not have *any* console games in the future." Of course, that's a bit extreme, but I prefer to err on the side of caution.
Optical discs are made to be quite hard to ruin unless you're doing it deliberately.
Go rent a few DVDs and then let's see how indestructible you think optical discs are. I can't remember the last time I didn't have to skip some part of a movie because of a scratch.
And for games, if a chunk of executable code gets scratched -- goodbye! No skipping that.
I play a lot of bridge on-line, and while you're right that players can mostly spell (when the occasion arises), I think they're just as bad when it comes to complete sentences.
Most conversations go about like:
hi all, need 1 more?
wlc
glp
wdo, gtp
sry p
Which is about as verbose as most other online games I've participated in over the last 8-9 years. (God, has it been that long?)
The PS2 - I wouldn't call it junk. There are some truly stellar games that look absolutely georgous on it (ICO comes to mind).
I think he's referring to something else when calling the PS2 'junk.' The XBox, while not exactly elegant, is basically a decent PC and has a decent overall design. The 'Cube, with its beautifully integrated design and customized PowerPC processor is a really tight little piece of engineering.
The PS2, however, is a mess. How many processors do you have to program in parallel to get decent performance out of it? How tiny is its VRAM? Well, yeah, it's got a 128-bit processor -- that's great. Now how does that help games again? It's like Sony designed the thing with only one goal in mind: big numbers to put on a feature list.
It's not that there aren't any good games out for it (there are many), it's that they're definitely held back by the limitations of the hardware they're running on.
I'd go almost as far as to say that Sony is the only company that *needs* to release new hardware. The XBox and 'Cube look great. They're both to the point that artistic direction have far more impact on a game's presentation than the hardware. I don't think that Sony can claim that of the PS2.
I had a long rebuttal to this, but I'm so sick of having this PC-vs-console argument.
You keep playing your 1337 PC games on your uB3r machine. I'll/we'll keep playing good games on whatever platform they come out on.
I can't believe that people are so petty that they have to argue "but my game system is so much better than yours!" as if anyone with a clue actually cares.
its a game. if people waged pretend wars, i believe that would eliminate the bloodlust for real wars. its like those people who are treated for fears of heights in a simulator. they recieve their stimulation artificially.
Let's follow your analogy to its logical conclusion:
Person X is afraid of heights (Y). X is treated for an aversion to Y by simulating Y. After treatment, person X no longer has an aversion to Y, and thus may be more inclined to do Y.
Replace Y with 'doing violent acts' and you'll see what your analogy is actually saying.
I'm not providing an argument either way -- I'm just pointing out that you have a record for one of the _worst_ _analogies_ _ever_.
I think that the difference here is that many people bought pre-paid subscriptions to XBox Live and didn't ever expect to be charged at all. They went to a store, picked up an XBox Live kit, and came home wanting to check it out. In all likelihood, they plugged in and kept clicking buttons until they could play something.
I've got another post in this discussion that makes my position on click-through TOS agreements very clear.
Your second point certainly applies in this case. Microsoft sold hundreds of thousands of XBox Live kits in November of 2002, many to people just like this guy, many of whom probably had no idea that they'd ever be charged again. So what does MS do? They wait 'til 45 days after they auto-renew the agreement to charge the marks (face it, they're basically scamming people out of money, hoping that most of them won't fight it) so that by the time they see it on their credit card bill, it's too late (as defined in the TOS agreement that nobody read) to dispute the charge.
This is a lot different than going into a gym, paying for a month and telling them "yeah, go ahead and automatically renew my monthly membership until I cancel." Even if they give you some number of free months, they aren't likely to ask "umm, oh yeah, and what's your CC #? We aren't going to charge you for the trial period, we just need it for our records," give you some 15-page long legal agreement for you to review (most of which you wouldn't understand), and then sneak a charge onto your card 2 months after you thought your trial membership had expired.
Clicking on an OK button has never been held up in court as being a 'signature,' even if you're a rude asshole.
Do I need a lawyer to notarize my click 'signature'? What if I'm under 18 and I just got a CC # from my parents so that I can sign up for this service that they already paid for? Am I supposed to read through pages and pages of legalese so that I know that, at some time in the future, Microsoft may charge me any amount they deem fit? Is there a way to opt-out of this part of the 'agreement'?
What if they also include a clause that states "if you dispute any charge, you agree to authorize Microsoft to charge $150,000 to my credit card to cover any potential legal bills Microsoft may incur while fighting your insignificant claim." Is it legally binding because I didn't read it, but pushed a button on my controller anyway? Is it legally binding because there hasn't been a pulic uproar about it yet? Is it legally binding just because it's not so rediculous that it couldn't possibly be legally binding? (Think about that one for a minute, because it's obvious that you haven't given it any consideration)
And how the hell can they change the TOS *after* I 'signed' it? Do I get my money back if I reject the new TOS?
Fuck TOS contracts. I'm not a lawyer and I shouldn't have to be to understand what I'm getting into when I go out and buy a $50 XBox Live kit. If I were licensing XBox Live for a university campus of 15,000 people and the stakes were more like $750,000, *then* I'd have a lawer with me to make sure things were kosher and that I understood every tiny detail. But I just want to play a goddamn game of NFL2k3. Let me say it again: Fuck TOS contracts.
Note: I don't have an XBox Live subscription. That said, Fuck TOS contracts anyway.
How's this: I can't even set up a system where my phone or cable providers auto-charge my accounts. I have to pay the bill every month.
Why should it be any different for something like this? Oh, yeah. It's because people are lazy... and most of the time, people will be too lazy to close the account in a timely manner. And if they get charged but don't want the account, they probably won't bother with contesting the excess charge.
Personally, I don't think that auto-renewal should be 'enforcable.' It's the company's responsibility to make sure that I *want* to renew, not my responsibility to make sure that they can't/don't charge me.
If pressure were put on the industry over this, and let's say maybe even a court case found a publisher liable for not including the warning, all that would happen is that *every* game would include the warning. (And this is already the case with every Nintendo game since back in the time of the NES).
You'd be right back where you started -- having no idea which games your son could safely play without playing every one all the way through.
I'm currently working on an independently developed game. This article has prompted me to include "this game could cause siezures in photosensitive players" in the readme just to cover my ass. I don't think that it's something that would cause siezures, but at the same time I don't want some pissed off parent with a team of lawyers coming after me and my team because I didn't include it.
Agreed. Another game that really bothered me like this was Splinter Cell.
You have 3 bright green lights on your forehead screaming "put a bullet here!"
Guards in the CIA and China hum "Fiddler on the Roof," and have thick Russian accents.
In a straight hallway in the CIA building, the lighting is so poor that a guard can't see you from a few feet away.
There are guards in the CIA building, patrolling the halls.
The only doors that you can open are the ones that you're 'supposed' to go through
Your super-elite bad-ass spy has absolutely no melee combat ability. Not even enough to engage/disarm a rifle-wielding foe at point-blank range.
Every time you start a new level, you're given almost no ammo. If you could carry it through the last level, why couldn't you keep it? Or at least hang on to a few extra clips... Is your special ops division so short funded that they need to sell off your excess ammo on the black market to finance your missions?
And I could go on and on. None of this would have bothered me if the game weren't trying to be so realistic. Of course, I'm in the minority here, since so many people *loved* the game. But I played through the entire game, and couldn't go longer than a few minutes before thinking "BS, this is stupid." Not hard, mind you. Just tedious and stupid.
Developers: if you're going to go for realism, don't be selective about what you think should be 'realistic'.
I don't want a debate about whether the PC is/was/ever will be the ultimate gaming platform; BUT, if it was/will be again, the XBox's hard drive was most certainly not the deciding factor.
And is that method simply: dump from framebuffer to file, import into Photoshop, scale to 3200x2400, and then reduce back to 1600x1200 with some antialiasing filter?
You're a marketing goon's wet dream. Neither you, nor anyone else outisde the dev teams has ever even *played* these games, but you're sitting there drooling over them like a moron. And to top it off, you're convinced that you shouldn't buy a competitor's product now because these things that will probably come out some time in the future could/should be prettier and may or may not be fun.
As an aside, while the other 3 should be good, all I have to say about Fable is: Black and White, anyone?
While you're waiting for the next big thing, (most of) the rest of us will be enjoying what's currently out. And believe it or not, there's a lot of top-quality stuff out for those 'inferior' systems right now.
Not meaning to flame you or anything, but what are you smoking?
I've been playing console games since the early 80s and PC games since the late 80s. I've never played a buggy console game. (That's not to say that they don't exist, but for the most part any good title will have no noticable bugs) Until very, very recently, the only buggy games available were on the patch-friendly PC.
Slashdot Mirror
So was this Kevin Bachus' "first move" after joining up with Infinium Labs? I don't recall hearing any other action from him since leaving Microsoft.
So, after a couple (few? I forget exactly when he defected) months with the team, the best thing he can come up with to add credibility (wasn't that one of the things he was touted to do?) to the Phantom is to sue a news site for libel and diluting their trademark?
What exactly was he in charge of on the DirectX team, anyway? The patent portfolio?
Or, giving him the benefit of the doubt, maybe calling the phone-in press conference was just the first task Mr. Roberts assigned him to?
It just makes me feel so warm and fuzzy inside when I see all these video game industry "leaders" from Microsoft (Seamus "I want to invent another layer of middle-man!" Blackley in particular) leave, only to be shown for the useless, uninspired jackasses that they are. It's a little harder to survive when they don't have a near limitless supply of cash, eh?
--Jeremy
You hate the waste of time that video games are, but your sig is a quote from the Brak Show on Adult Swim?
So, by your logic, it's ok to spend time in front of a screen if you're merely soaking in the entertainment, but not if you're actively engaging in it?
(Of course, maybe you don't watch the Brak Show, and just thought that the quote was funny in its own right. In that case, my bad. But I still think you're full of it.)
--Jeremy
I believe the point is: who in 2000 or 2001 expected Microsoft to actually be in stiff competition with Nintendo for the number 2 spot?
I believe the point should be: *anybody* that's willing to lose over 2 billion dollars could be in stiff competition for a spot in the market.
--Jeremy
As soon as it came out of its packaging, it oozed class and effort.
:)
Man, a machine with ugly neon green highlights definitely oozes something, but it ain't class or effort.
--Jeremy
Except in this case, the Beatles have absolutely no say in how it's used.
Basically, we're in a society where our culture is being bought up by wealthy individuals and large corporations, and then being sold back to use at highly inflated prices.
I don't think that was the original intent of copyrights.
--Jeremy
I am just really hoping that MS doesn't use it's endless coffers to run Nintendo out of business and then give up on the console market because they are not able to make it profitable.
Agreed. I've always felt that the actions and attitudes from key Microsoft players in charge of the XBox reeked of the actions and attitudes of the key execs at Atari at about the time of videogame crash of '84.
I generally tell people, "If you support the XBox, you may not have *any* console games in the future." Of course, that's a bit extreme, but I prefer to err on the side of caution.
--Jeremy
Optical discs are made to be quite hard to ruin unless you're doing it deliberately.
Go rent a few DVDs and then let's see how indestructible you think optical discs are. I can't remember the last time I didn't have to skip some part of a movie because of a scratch.
And for games, if a chunk of executable code gets scratched -- goodbye! No skipping that.
--Jeremy
Metroid Prime and Eternal Darkness are good.
That's an understatement. Prime and ED are two of the best games to come out for any system, ever.
--Jeremy
Twenty-eight percent of them play games between midnight and 5:00 a.m., considerably more than men or teenage game-players.
Well, yeah. Midnight to 5:00 a.m. is pr0n time for those other demographics.
--Jeremy
I play a lot of bridge on-line, and while you're right that players can mostly spell (when the occasion arises), I think they're just as bad when it comes to complete sentences.
Most conversations go about like:
hi all, need 1 more?
wlc
glp
wdo, gtp
sry p
Which is about as verbose as most other online games I've participated in over the last 8-9 years. (God, has it been that long?)
--Jeremy
The PS2 - I wouldn't call it junk. There are some truly stellar games that look absolutely georgous on it (ICO comes to mind).
I think he's referring to something else when calling the PS2 'junk.' The XBox, while not exactly elegant, is basically a decent PC and has a decent overall design. The 'Cube, with its beautifully integrated design and customized PowerPC processor is a really tight little piece of engineering.
The PS2, however, is a mess. How many processors do you have to program in parallel to get decent performance out of it? How tiny is its VRAM? Well, yeah, it's got a 128-bit processor -- that's great. Now how does that help games again? It's like Sony designed the thing with only one goal in mind: big numbers to put on a feature list.
It's not that there aren't any good games out for it (there are many), it's that they're definitely held back by the limitations of the hardware they're running on.
I'd go almost as far as to say that Sony is the only company that *needs* to release new hardware. The XBox and 'Cube look great. They're both to the point that artistic direction have far more impact on a game's presentation than the hardware. I don't think that Sony can claim that of the PS2.
--Jeremy
I had a long rebuttal to this, but I'm so sick of having this PC-vs-console argument.
You keep playing your 1337 PC games on your uB3r machine. I'll/we'll keep playing good games on whatever platform they come out on.
I can't believe that people are so petty that they have to argue "but my game system is so much better than yours!" as if anyone with a clue actually cares.
--Jeremy
its a game. if people waged pretend wars, i believe that would eliminate the bloodlust for real wars. its like those people who are treated for fears of heights in a simulator. they recieve their stimulation artificially.
Let's follow your analogy to its logical conclusion:
Person X is afraid of heights (Y). X is treated for an aversion to Y by simulating Y. After treatment, person X no longer has an aversion to Y, and thus may be more inclined to do Y.
Replace Y with 'doing violent acts' and you'll see what your analogy is actually saying.
I'm not providing an argument either way -- I'm just pointing out that you have a record for one of the _worst_ _analogies_ _ever_.
--Jeremy
Darl McBride announced that his dog fluffy, a 3 year old pomeranian had been kicked and severely injured.
The BBC is reporting that fanatical Linux and open source zealots are likely to be behind the attack on fluffy, because "they smell bad and hate SCO."
--Jeremy
I think that the difference here is that many people bought pre-paid subscriptions to XBox Live and didn't ever expect to be charged at all. They went to a store, picked up an XBox Live kit, and came home wanting to check it out. In all likelihood, they plugged in and kept clicking buttons until they could play something.
I've got another post in this discussion that makes my position on click-through TOS agreements very clear.
Your second point certainly applies in this case. Microsoft sold hundreds of thousands of XBox Live kits in November of 2002, many to people just like this guy, many of whom probably had no idea that they'd ever be charged again. So what does MS do? They wait 'til 45 days after they auto-renew the agreement to charge the marks (face it, they're basically scamming people out of money, hoping that most of them won't fight it) so that by the time they see it on their credit card bill, it's too late (as defined in the TOS agreement that nobody read) to dispute the charge.
This is a lot different than going into a gym, paying for a month and telling them "yeah, go ahead and automatically renew my monthly membership until I cancel." Even if they give you some number of free months, they aren't likely to ask "umm, oh yeah, and what's your CC #? We aren't going to charge you for the trial period, we just need it for our records," give you some 15-page long legal agreement for you to review (most of which you wouldn't understand), and then sneak a charge onto your card 2 months after you thought your trial membership had expired.
--Jeremy
Clicking on an OK button has never been held up in court as being a 'signature,' even if you're a rude asshole.
Do I need a lawyer to notarize my click 'signature'? What if I'm under 18 and I just got a CC # from my parents so that I can sign up for this service that they already paid for? Am I supposed to read through pages and pages of legalese so that I know that, at some time in the future, Microsoft may charge me any amount they deem fit? Is there a way to opt-out of this part of the 'agreement'?
What if they also include a clause that states "if you dispute any charge, you agree to authorize Microsoft to charge $150,000 to my credit card to cover any potential legal bills Microsoft may incur while fighting your insignificant claim." Is it legally binding because I didn't read it, but pushed a button on my controller anyway? Is it legally binding because there hasn't been a pulic uproar about it yet? Is it legally binding just because it's not so rediculous that it couldn't possibly be legally binding? (Think about that one for a minute, because it's obvious that you haven't given it any consideration)
And how the hell can they change the TOS *after* I 'signed' it? Do I get my money back if I reject the new TOS?
Fuck TOS contracts. I'm not a lawyer and I shouldn't have to be to understand what I'm getting into when I go out and buy a $50 XBox Live kit. If I were licensing XBox Live for a university campus of 15,000 people and the stakes were more like $750,000, *then* I'd have a lawer with me to make sure things were kosher and that I understood every tiny detail. But I just want to play a goddamn game of NFL2k3. Let me say it again: Fuck TOS contracts.
Note: I don't have an XBox Live subscription. That said, Fuck TOS contracts anyway.
--Jeremy
How's this: I can't even set up a system where my phone or cable providers auto-charge my accounts. I have to pay the bill every month.
... and most of the time, people will be too lazy to close the account in a timely manner. And if they get charged but don't want the account, they probably won't bother with contesting the excess charge.
Why should it be any different for something like this? Oh, yeah. It's because people are lazy
Personally, I don't think that auto-renewal should be 'enforcable.' It's the company's responsibility to make sure that I *want* to renew, not my responsibility to make sure that they can't/don't charge me.
--Jeremy
If pressure were put on the industry over this, and let's say maybe even a court case found a publisher liable for not including the warning, all that would happen is that *every* game would include the warning. (And this is already the case with every Nintendo game since back in the time of the NES).
You'd be right back where you started -- having no idea which games your son could safely play without playing every one all the way through.
I'm currently working on an independently developed game. This article has prompted me to include "this game could cause siezures in photosensitive players" in the readme just to cover my ass. I don't think that it's something that would cause siezures, but at the same time I don't want some pissed off parent with a team of lawyers coming after me and my team because I didn't include it.
--Jeremy
Agreed. Another game that really bothered me like this was Splinter Cell.
... Is your special ops division so short funded that they need to sell off your excess ammo on the black market to finance your missions?
You have 3 bright green lights on your forehead screaming "put a bullet here!"
Guards in the CIA and China hum "Fiddler on the Roof," and have thick Russian accents.
In a straight hallway in the CIA building, the lighting is so poor that a guard can't see you from a few feet away.
There are guards in the CIA building, patrolling the halls.
The only doors that you can open are the ones that you're 'supposed' to go through
Your super-elite bad-ass spy has absolutely no melee combat ability. Not even enough to engage/disarm a rifle-wielding foe at point-blank range.
Every time you start a new level, you're given almost no ammo. If you could carry it through the last level, why couldn't you keep it? Or at least hang on to a few extra clips
And I could go on and on. None of this would have bothered me if the game weren't trying to be so realistic. Of course, I'm in the minority here, since so many people *loved* the game. But I played through the entire game, and couldn't go longer than a few minutes before thinking "BS, this is stupid." Not hard, mind you. Just tedious and stupid.
Developers: if you're going to go for realism, don't be selective about what you think should be 'realistic'.
I don't want a debate about whether the PC is/was/ever will be the ultimate gaming platform; BUT, if it was/will be again, the XBox's hard drive was most certainly not the deciding factor.
--Jeremy
And is that method simply: dump from framebuffer to file, import into Photoshop, scale to 3200x2400, and then reduce back to 1600x1200 with some antialiasing filter?
--Jeremy
Halo2,DoomIII,Fable,Ninja Gaiden
You're a marketing goon's wet dream. Neither you, nor anyone else outisde the dev teams has ever even *played* these games, but you're sitting there drooling over them like a moron. And to top it off, you're convinced that you shouldn't buy a competitor's product now because these things that will probably come out some time in the future could/should be prettier and may or may not be fun.
As an aside, while the other 3 should be good, all I have to say about Fable is: Black and White, anyone?
While you're waiting for the next big thing, (most of) the rest of us will be enjoying what's currently out. And believe it or not, there's a lot of top-quality stuff out for those 'inferior' systems right now.
--Jeremy
Xbox is the only console to show any positive figures (up by 6% last I checked)
Umm, except the 'Cube, which increased year-on-year sales by better than 50% for several months.
Also, most things I've read put the XBox's YOY sales as mostly flat.
--Jeremy
low, buggy standards of console gaming
Not meaning to flame you or anything, but what are you smoking?
I've been playing console games since the early 80s and PC games since the late 80s. I've never played a buggy console game. (That's not to say that they don't exist, but for the most part any good title will have no noticable bugs) Until very, very recently, the only buggy games available were on the patch-friendly PC.
--Jeremy
You think that there is some special "For Presidential Addresses"-type Word Processor?
You think he wrote the state of the union address himself?
--Jeremy