Actually the name makes a lot of sense, past the business history, if you look at the games.
In the main series, at least, all of the games have one thing in common. They are the "final" battle between good and evil for that given world. The next game, goes to a new world, for that final conflict.
The whole thing is really quite compelling..much more than if it was one long series in one world, I think. Especially how they radically redesign the combat system for practically every game. And in fact, in most cases the combat system fits in with the games theme/story.
(BTW, even the Final Fantasy movie fit in to that idea. Actually I loved it, as it took some of our myths and made a "Final Fantasy" about that.)
In any case, I'm not really a "fan-boy" so to speak. I do see problems with it. Mainly how Square tends to throw in a extra end-boss at the end of the game sometimes, jut to shake things up.
But in any case it's amazing how long they've gone keeping up that amount of quality. Even their misses are not really misses. (I enjoyed FFVIII, it was a bit awkward..but you know, they do have balls to try something like that)
Sorry, I was unclear. I was talking about the phenomenon of gaming mags and sites pushing games that suck. (the new Tomb Raider? anyone?)
Rockstar is one of the most innovative companies in the business. Myself, I appriciate their effort, but think they need to work on controls a tad bit.
Ok Ok, this is not the troll, but it may be true. MS is at the end of their development line for their OS and Office. Their big revenue sources are gonig to go down relativly fast.
That is what the new subscription based licensing is, a way for them to get new blood from the same old stone.
In a nutshell, Microsoft is going to need to reinvent itself. Longhorn, to be honest is going to crash harder than a ton of bricks.
The future for MS is in the X-Box 2. Not as just a game console, but as an all-in-one media device. However, I think that they will not have the same success they once had.
Actually there is a systematic bias in the media. It's hard to pick up on, but if you watch it a lot, you can pick it up.
It's simple. The bias is their POLITICAL neutrality. How can neutrality be a bias? Quite simple. That neutrality rewards the extremists and punishes the moderates. Those that are willing to go to extremes find that their ideas and arguments are given equal credence to a moderate idea. Even if all the facts and fingures go against it. Must keep the neutrality!
Put that on top of that these sources are looking for viewers, so information gets pushed down, and entertainment gets pushed up. Meaning that the nuances of tax bills and foreign policy go pretty much unnoticed.
What we want is reality neutral. If something is BS..say it. Give the facts, and let us decide from that. Don't cover up facts in order to give the impression of political neutrality.
The point to the whole thing, is not the "hardcore" gamer, but the casual gamer. They will buy the system that has the games that they want to play at that time. Down the road, they will continue to play games of that same genre. It kind of reinforces things, so to speak.
And it's not whining. I'm just trying to point out that certain games will do better on some systems than others.
Microsoft gave Sega money to bring a few games to capture the Asian market. It didn't work. At this point, Sega would be better off releasing those Asian style games to the GC, which has more fans of that style. And they have been. See Sonic Adventure DX.
I can't wait to see Banjo-Kazooie brought to the X-Box..and be one of the biggest flops of all time.
I really liked that article..
on
Saving the Net
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's not about politics. At least not as how we normally think about it.
The idea that "property" is the one all-consuming right that we have, quite frankly is self-destructive. Sure, property is important...but copyright is exactly that. IP is bullshit.
To go a step further, the reason for this is the belief that we can all "do it ourselves". That somehow, we can pull ourselves up from the bootstraps and make ourselves successful is frankly...bullshit.
There are more important things than business, and money and profit.
Culture and society.
Those are the most important things we have. Without those things, everything else is meaningless. We need to start to realize that.
I agree with a limited copyright. My idea? Copyright should last for 20 years, or until the commercial aspect is gone. If you take something off the market, put it in the public domain. Allow those that care about the culture to nurture it.
They are conservative ideas however. One of the problem is that nobody can refute them in the current political enviroment. Make a sneeze toward it and you called a commie.
How can you fix it?
I don't know..
Re:Interview with Howard Dean
on
Saving the Net
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Re:The Patriot act, Dean has serious concerns about it, and thinks that parts of it go way too far and violate civil rights.
They do not have an official policy on the DMCA as of yet (I asked them) but they are formulating one, and I would suspect that it would be on the side of fair use and the right to tinker with what one owns.
As well, they are against the consolidation of the medis, for whatever that's worth.
Actually when it comes to tech, Dean is very close to Gingrich..which is not entirely a bad thing. Very strong on future tech and R&D.
If you include all licensed franchises, Golden Eye was great, the various X-Wing/Tie Fighter series games were golden. TMNT/GI Joe in the arcade as well.
To completely buck the CW, on a lark I rented Enter The Matrix the other day. I avoided it because of the bad reviews. I shouldn't have. Quite frankly, it is one of the best pure action games I've played in a long time. The good action game has pretty much died in the 3d era..it's good to have a fun one to play. The camera does suck sometimes, but it's not the worst I've seen. The driving stages are somewhat cheap, but they as well are fun. The game on hard is somewhat short, but provides a refreshing skill based challenge...something I havn't had in a long time.
I get the feeling people just expected more from it. I expected a simple beat-em-up with some cool cutscenes. I got what I was looking for. (And more, to be honest.)
I think the problem with FF8, is that most people got tired of it early on. It was pretty bad early on. You did not have enough powers or item manipulation. Even the story was a bit vapid.
*SPOILER WARNING*
About mid-way during the second disk, you start to get Item manipulation abilities for your GFs, and you start hunting for items to make other items to get magic and make weapons, it gets addictive.
Add on to that what is a great story. (In a nutshell, it's the most coherent FF story IMO, with the exception of IV. The revalation about Edea makes the story. The ending is the best I've seen *EVER* wrapping everything up wonderfully.)
Toy Story is Pixar, IMO, not Disney. Lion King and Aladdin are overrated. (But still good, just not great).
Mario Sunshine was great, just never really found its audience. (I think the game may have been too tricky compared to 64). Zelda WW is much better than the N64 games. Better camera and controls.
Yoshis Story was weird. It was an artistic gamble, which they mostly lost with IMO. Very similar to Wario Ware Inc, They tried to change/create a genre. What was there was good, but not up to standards of Yoshi's Island (which is freekin amazing)
I was unsure of RFIDs, to be honest, I did not know the technical capabilities of them.
All I can say is..
Wow..
Not necessarly a good wow, it is rather impressive 'tho..in a Klez kind of way. I do not think that this is TOO much of a worry as is, at least in this case.
Ok ok, there is a bit more than that. Our eyes are they primary sense we use when playing games. Good graphics actually become part of the gameplay.
A vivid display, the ability to pick out details, combined with a smooth frame-rate, makes games control a whole lot smoother. How a game controls is essentially the most important factor in how fun a game is. How a games graphics performs are an important factor in that.
3D graphics facilitate new gameplay ideas. The switchover was a good thing..(although overdone..we need more 2D titles..Viewtiful Joe should be great 'tho). Although to be honest, I think we are at the peak right now for graphics. We really do not need any better graphics. (Although more power in machines would be nice for more complex gameplay structures)
Microsoft was proven to be a monopoly. A monopoly is not just 100% control, it is effective market control.
When that happens, it is illegal to use that business to leverage unfair business advantage in seperate markets.
It was proven that MS used their OS monopoly in order to leverage position in other markets. As well, they used that power unfairly to keep out competition.
I think that MS current software is at a developmental end, to be honest. Win 2000/XP is good enough for any Windows desktop enviroment. There is no reason to upgrade. Same for Office, and most of their other software packages.
This is a huge problem for MS.
So they will slowly lose marketshare to Linux, without a new killer ap to draw the desktop market back. More and more people will be comfortable using it, and eventually Linux will be desktop ready. (Sometime fairly soon I suspect..over the next two years).
Eventually Linux will hit critical mass, the games will start coming, (Lets call a spade a spade, this is the only thing holding Linux back on the desktop), and it'll be over for MS as it stands today.
Boycott? No, that will just make the numbers worse, which will actually make the RIAA's case "stronger". Corporate ego and hubris will prevent them.
What we have here is a market failure. Believe it or not, it is not with CDs. Although expensive, with the Internet, you can order anything pretty much. As well, the rate of which used CD places are popping up is helping things. (Although the situation will get worse fairly quickly IMO)
No, where the market failure is in is the radio market. That is obvious. The consolodation of both stations and playlists, as well as the rerising of the "playola" scam, is standardizing the industry, to the detriment of music lovers.
That is really where P2P is competing. With Radio. CD sales are fairly stable (which frankly is a minor miracle, considering the competition from DVDs and the weak economy). From an economic standpoint, the actual music industry is actually rather uninvolved in this.
Yes, technicially it is illegal. However, it is correcting a market failure, and this needs to be acknowledged. Either in opening up competition in radio broadcasting, (especially webcasting) or allowing filesharing.
Speaking as a Canuck, with many friends in the US and an interest in politics in general..
The Democrats are the proof or the old saying "nice guys finish last". True patriots, they believe that if they give honest moderate opinions, that people will support them.
For the most part they are wrong. People like firebreathers and easy platitudes. Not to mention a media that until very recently was more concerned with political neutrality than presenting the facts, allowing the debate to be pushed further and further to the right.
There is hope in 2004, starting with the Dean campaign, which is tapping into the "moderate anger" that people have towards the administration. Regardless of if he gets the nomination, that is the new battle field...and a long overdue one I think
Seriously. Although I don't think it's so much necessary for the Playstation, to be honest, but I want emulators in my games. I've said this before and I'll say this again.
I want classic games included with newer ones.
This is something for the GameCube, of course, considering how Nintendo has the only straight-through hardware chain left these days.
In my dream world, every big new release would come with 3-4 old classic releases. They can even reuse them, I don't care. License the SMS and Genesis technology from Sega, and have Sega include their old games in their games. Old game-boy games, 8-bit and 16-bit games, would be great to see.
Would I be more apt to purchase a borderline game (as it is, I only buy the best) if it had a classic game I wanted to play? Of course I would. And considering if they could make a common emulator program, the costs would be low.
Even better would be if the system had a small amount of storage media to store roms you wanted to keep to both save games and ROMS so you didn't have to jump between discs...but I think that's asking TOO much.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the name makes a lot of sense, past the business history, if you look at the games. In the main series, at least, all of the games have one thing in common. They are the "final" battle between good and evil for that given world. The next game, goes to a new world, for that final conflict. The whole thing is really quite compelling..much more than if it was one long series in one world, I think. Especially how they radically redesign the combat system for practically every game. And in fact, in most cases the combat system fits in with the games theme/story. (BTW, even the Final Fantasy movie fit in to that idea. Actually I loved it, as it took some of our myths and made a "Final Fantasy" about that.) In any case, I'm not really a "fan-boy" so to speak. I do see problems with it. Mainly how Square tends to throw in a extra end-boss at the end of the game sometimes, jut to shake things up. But in any case it's amazing how long they've gone keeping up that amount of quality. Even their misses are not really misses. (I enjoyed FFVIII, it was a bit awkward..but you know, they do have balls to try something like that)
Sorry, I was unclear. I was talking about the phenomenon of gaming mags and sites pushing games that suck. (the new Tomb Raider? anyone?)
Rockstar is one of the most innovative companies in the business. Myself, I appriciate their effort, but think they need to work on controls a tad bit.
Canadian Health Care is really inefficent...it has to be.
You have a lot of rural areas seperated by some distance..a lot more than in the US. This creates more duplication of services, and more waste.
The Canadian system does a wonderful job considering the natural geographic problems it has by nature of being Canadian.
Why do they even bother? All they do is endlessly promote games that may not be any good anyway.
It's a waste of time, energy and money. Just make the game, and let it speak for itself.
Ok Ok, this is not the troll, but it may be true. MS is at the end of their development line for their OS and Office. Their big revenue sources are gonig to go down relativly fast.
That is what the new subscription based licensing is, a way for them to get new blood from the same old stone.
In a nutshell, Microsoft is going to need to reinvent itself. Longhorn, to be honest is going to crash harder than a ton of bricks.
The future for MS is in the X-Box 2. Not as just a game console, but as an all-in-one media device. However, I think that they will not have the same success they once had.
Actually a lot of people care about it. Pretty much everybody who has heard about it.
Over the course of a presidential campaign, given a candidate not afriad to go to bat?
It will become a huge issue.
Go ahead Bush...
Bring it...
This bill gets vetoed, it's over for Bush. Easy as that.
Actually there is a systematic bias in the media. It's hard to pick up on, but if you watch it a lot, you can pick it up.
It's simple. The bias is their POLITICAL neutrality. How can neutrality be a bias? Quite simple. That neutrality rewards the extremists and punishes the moderates. Those that are willing to go to extremes find that their ideas and arguments are given equal credence to a moderate idea. Even if all the facts and fingures go against it. Must keep the neutrality!
Put that on top of that these sources are looking for viewers, so information gets pushed down, and entertainment gets pushed up. Meaning that the nuances of tax bills and foreign policy go pretty much unnoticed.
What we want is reality neutral. If something is BS..say it. Give the facts, and let us decide from that. Don't cover up facts in order to give the impression of political neutrality.
The point to the whole thing, is not the "hardcore" gamer, but the casual gamer. They will buy the system that has the games that they want to play at that time. Down the road, they will continue to play games of that same genre. It kind of reinforces things, so to speak.
And it's not whining. I'm just trying to point out that certain games will do better on some systems than others.
Microsoft gave Sega money to bring a few games to capture the Asian market. It didn't work. At this point, Sega would be better off releasing those Asian style games to the GC, which has more fans of that style. And they have been. See Sonic Adventure DX.
I can't wait to see Banjo-Kazooie brought to the X-Box..and be one of the biggest flops of all time.
It's not about politics. At least not as how we normally think about it.
The idea that "property" is the one all-consuming right that we have, quite frankly is self-destructive. Sure, property is important...but copyright is exactly that. IP is bullshit.
To go a step further, the reason for this is the belief that we can all "do it ourselves". That somehow, we can pull ourselves up from the bootstraps and make ourselves successful is frankly...bullshit.
There are more important things than business, and money and profit.
Culture and society.
Those are the most important things we have. Without those things, everything else is meaningless. We need to start to realize that.
I agree with a limited copyright. My idea? Copyright should last for 20 years, or until the commercial aspect is gone. If you take something off the market, put it in the public domain. Allow those that care about the culture to nurture it.
They are conservative ideas however. One of the problem is that nobody can refute them in the current political enviroment. Make a sneeze toward it and you called a commie.
How can you fix it?
I don't know..
Re:The Patriot act, Dean has serious concerns about it, and thinks that parts of it go way too far and violate civil rights.
They do not have an official policy on the DMCA as of yet (I asked them) but they are formulating one, and I would suspect that it would be on the side of fair use and the right to tinker with what one owns.
As well, they are against the consolidation of the medis, for whatever that's worth.
Actually when it comes to tech, Dean is very close to Gingrich..which is not entirely a bad thing. Very strong on future tech and R&D.
I think you're right.
It wouldn't really fit in with the userbase for the X-Box, but for the userbase of the GC, it would fit in really well.
Same thing with Jet Set Radio Future. Wrong platform/userbase. It's a lot more complicated than simple numbers.
If you include all licensed franchises, Golden Eye was great, the various X-Wing/Tie Fighter series games were golden. TMNT/GI Joe in the arcade as well.
To completely buck the CW, on a lark I rented Enter The Matrix the other day. I avoided it because of the bad reviews. I shouldn't have. Quite frankly, it is one of the best pure action games I've played in a long time. The good action game has pretty much died in the 3d era..it's good to have a fun one to play. The camera does suck sometimes, but it's not the worst I've seen. The driving stages are somewhat cheap, but they as well are fun. The game on hard is somewhat short, but provides a refreshing skill based challenge...something I havn't had in a long time.
I get the feeling people just expected more from it. I expected a simple beat-em-up with some cool cutscenes. I got what I was looking for. (And more, to be honest.)
I think the problem with FF8, is that most people got tired of it early on. It was pretty bad early on. You did not have enough powers or item manipulation. Even the story was a bit vapid.
*SPOILER WARNING*
About mid-way during the second disk, you start to get Item manipulation abilities for your GFs, and you start hunting for items to make other items to get magic and make weapons, it gets addictive.
Add on to that what is a great story. (In a nutshell, it's the most coherent FF story IMO, with the exception of IV. The revalation about Edea makes the story. The ending is the best I've seen *EVER* wrapping everything up wonderfully.)
FFVIII is better than the negative hype
Why are people so..harsh on hard sci-fi? Especially in non-book mediums?
Personally, I like it. Sure the charactures kinds suck. But what do you expect? The characters in hard sci-fi books suck.
Toy Story is Pixar, IMO, not Disney. Lion King and Aladdin are overrated. (But still good, just not great).
Mario Sunshine was great, just never really found its audience. (I think the game may have been too tricky compared to 64). Zelda WW is much better than the N64 games. Better camera and controls.
Yoshis Story was weird. It was an artistic gamble, which they mostly lost with IMO. Very similar to Wario Ware Inc, They tried to change/create a genre. What was there was good, but not up to standards of Yoshi's Island (which is freekin amazing)
Nintendo=Walt Disney?
I don't think so.
Nintendo has constant high quality for all of their games. Not only that, there is little that comes across as rushed.
The Walt Disney of game companies? Edios. Enough said.
I was unsure of RFIDs, to be honest, I did not know the technical capabilities of them.
All I can say is..
Wow..
Not necessarly a good wow, it is rather impressive 'tho..in a Klez kind of way. I do not think that this is TOO much of a worry as is, at least in this case.
But the technical potential?
wow.
See the topic. That is it in a nutshell.
Ok ok, there is a bit more than that. Our eyes are they primary sense we use when playing games. Good graphics actually become part of the gameplay.
A vivid display, the ability to pick out details, combined with a smooth frame-rate, makes games control a whole lot smoother. How a game controls is essentially the most important factor in how fun a game is. How a games graphics performs are an important factor in that.
3D graphics facilitate new gameplay ideas. The switchover was a good thing..(although overdone..we need more 2D titles..Viewtiful Joe should be great 'tho). Although to be honest, I think we are at the peak right now for graphics. We really do not need any better graphics. (Although more power in machines would be nice for more complex gameplay structures)
Excuse me for feeding the troll..
Microsoft was proven to be a monopoly. A monopoly is not just 100% control, it is effective market control.
When that happens, it is illegal to use that business to leverage unfair business advantage in seperate markets.
It was proven that MS used their OS monopoly in order to leverage position in other markets. As well, they used that power unfairly to keep out competition.
That, is what is illegal.
Actually, I suspect as much as well.
I think that MS current software is at a developmental end, to be honest. Win 2000/XP is good enough for any Windows desktop enviroment. There is no reason to upgrade. Same for Office, and most of their other software packages.
This is a huge problem for MS.
So they will slowly lose marketshare to Linux, without a new killer ap to draw the desktop market back. More and more people will be comfortable using it, and eventually Linux will be desktop ready. (Sometime fairly soon I suspect..over the next two years).
Eventually Linux will hit critical mass, the games will start coming, (Lets call a spade a spade, this is the only thing holding Linux back on the desktop), and it'll be over for MS as it stands today.
What to do..
What to do..
Boycott? No, that will just make the numbers worse, which will actually make the RIAA's case "stronger". Corporate ego and hubris will prevent them.
What we have here is a market failure. Believe it or not, it is not with CDs. Although expensive, with the Internet, you can order anything pretty much. As well, the rate of which used CD places are popping up is helping things. (Although the situation will get worse fairly quickly IMO)
No, where the market failure is in is the radio market. That is obvious. The consolodation of both stations and playlists, as well as the rerising of the "playola" scam, is standardizing the industry, to the detriment of music lovers.
That is really where P2P is competing. With Radio. CD sales are fairly stable (which frankly is a minor miracle, considering the competition from DVDs and the weak economy). From an economic standpoint, the actual music industry is actually rather uninvolved in this.
Yes, technicially it is illegal. However, it is correcting a market failure, and this needs to be acknowledged. Either in opening up competition in radio broadcasting, (especially webcasting) or allowing filesharing.
Their choice.
Speaking as a Canuck, with many friends in the US and an interest in politics in general..
The Democrats are the proof or the old saying "nice guys finish last". True patriots, they believe that if they give honest moderate opinions, that people will support them.
For the most part they are wrong.
People like firebreathers and easy platitudes. Not to mention a media that until very recently was more concerned with political neutrality than presenting the facts, allowing the debate to be pushed further and further to the right.
There is hope in 2004, starting with the Dean campaign, which is tapping into the "moderate anger" that people have towards the administration. Regardless of if he gets the nomination, that is the new battle field...and a long overdue one I think
Seriously. Although I don't think it's so much necessary for the Playstation, to be honest, but I want emulators in my games. I've said this before and I'll say this again.
I want classic games included with newer ones.
This is something for the GameCube, of course, considering how Nintendo has the only straight-through hardware chain left these days.
In my dream world, every big new release would come with 3-4 old classic releases. They can even reuse them, I don't care. License the SMS and Genesis technology from Sega, and have Sega include their old games in their games. Old game-boy games, 8-bit and 16-bit games, would be great to see.
Would I be more apt to purchase a borderline game (as it is, I only buy the best) if it had a classic game I wanted to play? Of course I would. And considering if they could make a common emulator program, the costs would be low.
Even better would be if the system had a small amount of storage media to store roms you wanted to keep to both save games and ROMS so you didn't have to jump between discs...but I think that's asking TOO much.
20-25% unemployment
Massive social uphevel
No job security
There is no solution.
We played the game as a society, and we lost.
Such is life.