Just "blaming immigrants" is not going to help anything. There are deeper problems in play.
Yeah, it's true that neither party directly talks about them. But then again, nobody else really talks about it either. Because in order to talk about it, you need to start to link issues together, and once you do that, well..people's heads start to explode I think.
Yeah I know. It's Slate. But it's still the best article I've seen on the real problem. To those who scan and don't like to clink links..here it is.
Infrastructure inefficency. That's the long and the short of it. The US is in a terrible bind at this point, basically held hostage to a few vested interests that prevent any sort of progress. Health care is the obvious one, and it's the big one. Costs have gone up about 45% in the last 3 years (YIKES!!). But it's seen as the bottom floor for a decent job. It's almost to the point (if not there already) that health care costs are MORE than employment in some cases. As well, you have transportation and energy, which are all wrapped up together. These interests fight increased gas milage standards, as well as fight for more sensible urban design/mass transit. Which increases demand for energy which increases cost.
401ks, where growth in the fund more and more is not reliant on dividends and profits from your investments, but on short-term trading and having some sucker buy your investment for more than what you paid for it...but it'll rarely pay out.
An educational culture that, frankly, gets parents up in arms when their kids are actually tought to think for themselves. No thank you, we just want them indocrinated.
All these things..and more.. are major infrastructure problems inside the US that need to be taken care of ASAP, but very few people are talking about them. Mainly because I think the biggest infrastructure problem of them all, is this negative optimism that persists, where people don't want to hear problems. They want to think that everything is just fine and peachy and nothing can ever get better. Things never get better unless you make them better.
You won't see that. In fact, what got CBS into trouble is that they went through the trouble of trying to fact-check in the first place.
They could have just went on and just covered it in the same "he-said she-said" manner that practically every other news source uses. This way, they don't need to be worry about being fact-checked themselves because they're not presenting facts...just opinion.
In this way, they actually present more lies than truth. This Rather thing is a very small drop in the bucket.
One of the killer aps of the Napster age, is the ability to "surf" collections. To basically see what other people who have similar tastes, and to explore then looking for new stuff. Because of the consolidation of radio, that was and still IS the killer app of the P2P age. Community. We all want it.
Overall, the big problem I see with the economy, what entitles "success", and the expectation there-of. Basically, increasing profits as far as the eye can see, which frankly, has its limits.
#1. I would suggest using a region based minimum wage based on some sort of scientific formula. Basically, add together all basic costs and add 10% or so for discretionary spending/saving and tie that in to a 140 hr/month work.
Do that for individual areas, and it would make sure that people see the value of hard work and labour.
#2. What you say is very true, which is why to make it happen it has to be done right. Generally speaking, in what's paid out in Medicare alone, on a per person basis, could pay for UHC for the whole country, with quite a bit of savings. That's the numbers and how they work out.
#3. Actually it creates quite a bit more than 7%. Money doesn't get spent once and disappears. It keeps on spinning around, creating more demand for services, creating more demand for labour.
In any case, it's more of a re-calibration of the economy than anything else into a service based economy. Eventually there will be enough money/jobs flowing around that government intervention will be minimal.
I don't have anything against corporations. What I do have something against is the assumption that profits are infinate. As well, short-term thinking is the rule of the day, which is good for CEOs and their bonus checks, not so good for the average investor, worker, or citizen.
You just need to be willing to think outside the box. To look at the big picture.
Problem:The debt is every growing, unless drastic measures, which are politically implausible are taken. Why?
Not enough tax money is being taken in to cover the costs. Simple. So you can either cut costs, or you can figure out ways to expand the tax base. Can you expand the tax base without raising taxes? Sure can!
Steps that can be taken: #1. Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount. This would increase the tax base by quite a wide margain. As well, it would relieve strain on various governmental services by quite a wide bit. Sure, it would cut down on corporate profits...boo fucking hoo.
#2. For the cost of the medicare system, we can publicize the whole thing and bring out Universal Health Care. Again overal this would create more a more efficent system, which basic economics says creates more jobs, meaning a higher tax base. As well, it would have a nice side-effect of fighting overseas job loss, as rising health care costs are a big motivator to move the jobs in the first place. Cut the parasites out.
#3. Make it official government policy to have as many people to work as possible. Current government policy is to maintain a certain unemployment rate to fight inflation. Get the people you need to do whatever jobs needed to be done. Sure it costs tax dollars. But with all the spinoff money of those jobs, the amount of taxes taken in will much more than account for the additional costs.
Three steps that can be taken to enlargen the tax base without costing you a dime. (Unless you pay somebody minimum wage, which in that case FUCK YOU parasite). Yeah the corporations will bitch and scream. But it's pure survival folks. It's them or us.
You don't want balance 'tho. That's the problem with the US media.
Balance reduces everything to a "he said-she said" format that basically gets nowhere. What you need is a return to the old journalistic standards of accuracy. Was F9/11 perfectly accurate, no. Was it more accurate than most things you see on the nightly news? Yeah, most nights.
Why? The nightly news mostly reports claims without any sort of fact-checking. F9/11 on the other hand, did allow those on the other side ample airtime to explain their views. (Ok, so it's kinda old, but it was their views. That they changed them so often well...who's fault is that?)
Actually the spinning on that site is even worse. Often times it works around what Moore is actually trying to say.
It's more of an exercise is knocking down strawmen than anything.
One of the confusing things people have about F9/11 is that for large parts of the movie, Moore doesn't give a conclusion. He just puts up the facts, which frankly add up to something even worse than what reality is. Was this done on purpose? I actually don't think so. I never even noticed until I had some non-political types watch it.
Dude, it's the Selection aspect that they're FOCUSED on.
They're in the process of doing two things. They are protecting against an independant artist becoming the next big thing. As well, they are consolodating their acts in order to make more money.
The only way to do this is to maintain absolute control over the promotion side of things. The consolodation of radio allows this to happen.
Actually because you miss the forest for the trees. (Although I havn't modded you down).
The power of P2P isn't about the people just wanting the "one good track"...sometimes it is..but have you ever thought of why? Because they might listen to the radio on the way home from work, and hear a song, and they want to lazy-ass format shift it.
That's what that is..
But no, the real danger to the RIAA about P2P has nothing to do with that. What it DOES have to do with, is people discovering new music, you know, things that every song on the CD are good? The REAL danger, is that the next big thing will come up without them and decide to stay independent. That will motivate other people to do exactly the same thing. Through controlling the levers of promotion, the RIAA can do a good job of preventing that. However, P2P does an end run about that. Oops.
The other side of the coin, is that the RIAA are trying to consolidate their acts. They want to sell more CDs of less artists. However, P2P are introducing people to the music of the non-promoted artists, giving them more bargining power.
They were allowed to take over something that's a core part of our culture, and now people are doing an end run around them.
The thing is, if that's your moral meter, then purchasing a used copy is stealing as well. Which it's not, but it has the EXACT SAME EFFECT for the artist/producer. Which is basically none.
Now, sure it is legal. But if you're going to say one is more ethical than the other...
In any case, the real "argument" against P2P is that it breaks the tightly controlled chains of PROMOTION that are uses to limit the amount of music that people are exposed to. Less acts==less promotion costs==more profit.
Ok, I thought it would be a tech demo for the longest time. When I started playing it, I was impressed. It looked nice. The sounds of the marines when the base fell were impressivly cool.
The game gets real boring real fast.
There's no real oomph to the weapons. You feel like you're fighting with peashooters. The enemies don't reaact to being shot. The game feels so sterile. There are pretty cool scenes in it, and the graphics are nice...
The game itself is very bleh.
Yet all the game sites will give it top of the line reviews, mainly because they've been hyping it for so long, to go back on that now would look bad.
Compared to the latest and greatest, off the top of my head, Painkiller and Nitro Family were more enjoyable. It's all about the funfactor..something id forgot about.
Viewtiful Joe. Love the box art. More than likely because I love the art style. Same with Disgaea.
Final Fantasy, at least in Japan. I love the logos. The name of the game in that crystallized text, with a picture representation of a game element in the background. (X had Yuna's sending dance, VII had a comet, VI had a Magitec armor. etc)
That's pretty much the best in my book. Everything else kind of blends together.
Yeah, pretty much. It's all moral philosophy really. I happen to love that, to each their own.
That said, my second favorite genre, is what I call the Viewtiful genre. Basically cool stuff games. Viewtiful Joe, Devil May Cry, Ninja Gaiden, etc.
Games that you get a rewarding sense of pure style from.
I'm also a big Miyamoto/Nintendo fan, but it's not all roses.. (Wind Waker, SMB 3/Yoshi's Island), there's a few thorns. (Super Mario Sunshine, the N64 Zelda's, which were stiff and played like crap.
As a big-RPG buff, personally, I don't see where the problem is. Maybe it's that the genere is becoming less popular, whatever. I don't think it is personally.
Is the genre getting old? No, of course not. On both fronts, better things are coming out all the time. Domestically, games like KOTOR are coming out that are probably more ambitious than ever before. I don't particularly like those games, they're too much hack and slash for my taste, but whatever.
On the Japaneese side, there's all the whining..yes whining, about how "linear" they are, no replayablity, whatever. They don't get it. What a JRPG, Final Fantasy style mostly is, it's a new form of book. It gives a story the length of an epic novel, but a graphical representation of that. There was no more replayability in the old days, there never was. Not that there IS no replayability, it's just what you make out of it.
Are the stories getting worse? Not really. Actually, to my mind they're getting more ambitious. The bar keeps rising. Of course, there's the throw away stuff, but then again, there's the great stuff.
For my mind, the whole epic of FFX and FFX-2 (Which is NOT a light happy throw-away game. If they did it without the "light" style, the game would have been too dark. As it is it straddles the line..) is one of the best stories I've ever experienced. Sure the game is linear. But it's supposed to be that way. It's a story to experience wrapped up in an entertaining combat mode.
If you don't like it, fine. But it's always been that way.
Neither of the NYT articles get it..
on
P2P Bits
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Both assume that somehow the RIAA should play nice with alternative distribution/promotion methods, and somehow that they are trying to do that, just going about it the wrong way.
Frankly, that's foolish.
The RIAA has absolutly nothing to gain by releasing the promotional controls they have over the industry. Why? Because it completly removes all their power. P2P/Webcasting make the threat of the next big thing coming up outside their reach very possible...and possibly very likly.
The fight over P2P and webcasting is not intended to raise money in the short term, it's intended to monopolize the promotional channels to ensure their long-term relevence.
I think the PSP is one of those examples of Sony trying to be too cute. Relying on unproven technology and thinking they can force it through, especially when it's going to be relativly expensive.
As a gaming machine it'll be pretty cool, but it's going to be marketed at a wider basis, which is really going to dull its impact.
The DS, because of its backwards compatibility, will be somewhat popular, although to be honest, it's Game Boy 2.5. GBC being 1.5, Advance 2, and the DS 2.5. You'll see some games, but it'll be a mix between Advance and regular GBA.
I would say, that with a downgrade in graphics, and a few slight tweaks, this is basically Final Fantasy XI. Not that this is a BAD thing....
Actually, that guild system seems like too much of a pain. I like the Linkshell I'm in FFXI, tons of people, always helping each other out, like a strong large community, always growing, and there's no real motive for us not to grow, meet new people and join together.
No PvP is a big improvement 'tho...PvP attracts the immature set..
Re:Time Unleashed a New Beast
on
Meet Joe Blog
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The only problem I had with the article (it went through the whole blogosphere, as we call it, yesterday), is the assumption that blogs are somehow more "biased".
They're not.
The biggest bias in modern media, is the fairness bias. In essense, they take all claims, regardless of any sort of factual truth to them, as being equally valid. That's the bias that these blogs tend to throw right out. And by doing so, they often times come up with analysis that is way above what mainstream pundits are doing.
Additional Links...
on
Meet Joe Blog
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
With their #1. Disgaea is just an amazing game. It's better than the sum of its parts. It's just a whole lot of fun, with a lot of nice touches. (The end-of-chapter Etna parodies are frankly hilarious.)
I'm not a fan of FF Tactics. The battle engine just doesn't..SING..ya know?
However, there are two big omissions.
#1. Shining Force whatever. Great SRPG. You get enough characters, and they each have their use, to really customize their force. They don't all blend together.
#2. Dark Wizard for the Sega CD. This was a huge SRPG. Hex-grid based, you'd summon and hire warriors and monsters, and so would the enemy. You had to march your army, 30 or so creatures, across the field, and take out the enemy commander (who is tough as nails).
No, it didn't only happen when Relm sketched an invisible creature.
It also happened if Relm sketched a certain enemy, Zone Eater I believe it was called (The enemy if it sucked your entire team down, you went into the cave where you could find Gogo.
When you did that, your whole inventory and/or saved games could/would be messed up. Things like 255 of certain items you couldn't even get.
Mind you, being 14 at the time, it wasn't a bug, but a feature.
But I think it's something that's swept under the rug a lot, I think. I don't think it should be banned, I think it's a right we all have to sell the things we paid for.
But at the same time, when I purchase media, the MAIN reason I do that is to reward the producer. If I wanted just to have it and not reward the producer, I'd just go download it. Seriously.
I think it does have to do with the amount that people are willing to pay. However, it seems that ANY discount from an original shrink-wrapped copy is really just pissing in the wind..isn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Just "blaming immigrants" is not going to help anything. There are deeper problems in play.
Yeah, it's true that neither party directly talks about them. But then again, nobody else really talks about it either. Because in order to talk about it, you need to start to link issues together, and once you do that, well..people's heads start to explode I think.
Try this link: here
Yeah I know. It's Slate. But it's still the best article I've seen on the real problem. To those who scan and don't like to clink links..here it is.
Infrastructure inefficency. That's the long and the short of it. The US is in a terrible bind at this point, basically held hostage to a few vested interests that prevent any sort of progress. Health care is the obvious one, and it's the big one. Costs have gone up about 45% in the last 3 years (YIKES!!). But it's seen as the bottom floor for a decent job. It's almost to the point (if not there already) that health care costs are MORE than employment in some cases. As well, you have transportation and energy, which are all wrapped up together. These interests fight increased gas milage standards, as well as fight for more sensible urban design/mass transit. Which increases demand for energy which increases cost.
401ks, where growth in the fund more and more is not reliant on dividends and profits from your investments, but on short-term trading and having some sucker buy your investment for more than what you paid for it...but it'll rarely pay out.
An educational culture that, frankly, gets parents up in arms when their kids are actually tought to think for themselves. No thank you, we just want them indocrinated.
All these things..and more.. are major infrastructure problems inside the US that need to be taken care of ASAP, but very few people are talking about them. Mainly because I think the biggest infrastructure problem of them all, is this negative optimism that persists, where people don't want to hear problems. They want to think that everything is just fine and peachy and nothing can ever get better. Things never get better unless you make them better.
You won't see that. In fact, what got CBS into trouble is that they went through the trouble of trying to fact-check in the first place.
They could have just went on and just covered it in the same "he-said she-said" manner that practically every other news source uses. This way, they don't need to be worry about being fact-checked themselves because they're not presenting facts...just opinion.
In this way, they actually present more lies than truth. This Rather thing is a very small drop in the bucket.
Actually there is.
One of the killer aps of the Napster age, is the ability to "surf" collections. To basically see what other people who have similar tastes, and to explore then looking for new stuff. Because of the consolidation of radio, that was and still IS the killer app of the P2P age. Community. We all want it.
Not me.
I've played them all since #1. I can honestly say that my favorite is X by far. Best fighting engine+somewhat fun level up system+great story.
Overall, the big problem I see with the economy, what entitles "success", and the expectation there-of. Basically, increasing profits as far as the eye can see, which frankly, has its limits.
#1. I would suggest using a region based minimum wage based on some sort of scientific formula. Basically, add together all basic costs and add 10% or so for discretionary spending/saving and tie that in to a 140 hr/month work.
Do that for individual areas, and it would make sure that people see the value of hard work and labour.
#2. What you say is very true, which is why to make it happen it has to be done right. Generally speaking, in what's paid out in Medicare alone, on a per person basis, could pay for UHC for the whole country, with quite a bit of savings. That's the numbers and how they work out.
#3. Actually it creates quite a bit more than 7%. Money doesn't get spent once and disappears. It keeps on spinning around, creating more demand for services, creating more demand for labour.
In any case, it's more of a re-calibration of the economy than anything else into a service based economy. Eventually there will be enough money/jobs flowing around that government intervention will be minimal.
I don't have anything against corporations. What I do have something against is the assumption that profits are infinate. As well, short-term thinking is the rule of the day, which is good for CEOs and their bonus checks, not so good for the average investor, worker, or citizen.
You just need to be willing to think outside the box. To look at the big picture.
Problem:The debt is every growing, unless drastic measures, which are politically implausible are taken. Why?
Not enough tax money is being taken in to cover the costs. Simple. So you can either cut costs, or you can figure out ways to expand the tax base. Can you expand the tax base without raising taxes? Sure can!
Steps that can be taken:
#1. Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount. This would increase the tax base by quite a wide margain. As well, it would relieve strain on various governmental services by quite a wide bit. Sure, it would cut down on corporate profits...boo fucking hoo.
#2. For the cost of the medicare system, we can publicize the whole thing and bring out Universal Health Care. Again overal this would create more a more efficent system, which basic economics says creates more jobs, meaning a higher tax base. As well, it would have a nice side-effect of fighting overseas job loss, as rising health care costs are a big motivator to move the jobs in the first place. Cut the parasites out.
#3. Make it official government policy to have as many people to work as possible. Current government policy is to maintain a certain unemployment rate to fight inflation. Get the people you need to do whatever jobs needed to be done. Sure it costs tax dollars. But with all the spinoff money of those jobs, the amount of taxes taken in will much more than account for the additional costs.
Three steps that can be taken to enlargen the tax base without costing you a dime. (Unless you pay somebody minimum wage, which in that case FUCK YOU parasite). Yeah the corporations will bitch and scream. But it's pure survival folks. It's them or us.
Take your pick.
You don't want balance 'tho. That's the problem with the US media.
Balance reduces everything to a "he said-she said" format that basically gets nowhere. What you need is a return to the old journalistic standards of accuracy. Was F9/11 perfectly accurate, no. Was it more accurate than most things you see on the nightly news? Yeah, most nights.
Why? The nightly news mostly reports claims without any sort of fact-checking. F9/11 on the other hand, did allow those on the other side ample airtime to explain their views. (Ok, so it's kinda old, but it was their views. That they changed them so often well...who's fault is that?)
Actually the spinning on that site is even worse. Often times it works around what Moore is actually trying to say.
It's more of an exercise is knocking down strawmen than anything.
One of the confusing things people have about F9/11 is that for large parts of the movie, Moore doesn't give a conclusion. He just puts up the facts, which frankly add up to something even worse than what reality is. Was this done on purpose? I actually don't think so. I never even noticed until I had some non-political types watch it.
Dude, it's the Selection aspect that they're FOCUSED on.
They're in the process of doing two things. They are protecting against an independant artist becoming the next big thing. As well, they are consolodating their acts in order to make more money.
The only way to do this is to maintain absolute control over the promotion side of things. The consolodation of radio allows this to happen.
P2P is an end run around this.
Their motives are not so pure.
Actually because you miss the forest for the trees. (Although I havn't modded you down).
The power of P2P isn't about the people just wanting the "one good track"...sometimes it is..but have you ever thought of why? Because they might listen to the radio on the way home from work, and hear a song, and they want to lazy-ass format shift it.
That's what that is..
But no, the real danger to the RIAA about P2P has nothing to do with that. What it DOES have to do with, is people discovering new music, you know, things that every song on the CD are good? The REAL danger, is that the next big thing will come up without them and decide to stay independent. That will motivate other people to do exactly the same thing. Through controlling the levers of promotion, the RIAA can do a good job of preventing that. However, P2P does an end run about that. Oops.
The other side of the coin, is that the RIAA are trying to consolidate their acts. They want to sell more CDs of less artists. However, P2P are introducing people to the music of the non-promoted artists, giving them more bargining power.
They were allowed to take over something that's a core part of our culture, and now people are doing an end run around them.
Tough luck guys. Try competing next time.
The thing is, if that's your moral meter, then purchasing a used copy is stealing as well. Which it's not, but it has the EXACT SAME EFFECT for the artist/producer. Which is basically none.
Now, sure it is legal. But if you're going to say one is more ethical than the other...
In any case, the real "argument" against P2P is that it breaks the tightly controlled chains of PROMOTION that are uses to limit the amount of music that people are exposed to. Less acts==less promotion costs==more profit.
It's a tech demo.
Ok, I thought it would be a tech demo for the longest time. When I started playing it, I was impressed. It looked nice. The sounds of the marines when the base fell were impressivly cool.
The game gets real boring real fast.
There's no real oomph to the weapons. You feel like you're fighting with peashooters. The enemies don't reaact to being shot. The game feels so sterile. There are pretty cool scenes in it, and the graphics are nice...
The game itself is very bleh.
Yet all the game sites will give it top of the line reviews, mainly because they've been hyping it for so long, to go back on that now would look bad.
Compared to the latest and greatest, off the top of my head, Painkiller and Nitro Family were more enjoyable. It's all about the funfactor..something id forgot about.
From HardOCPs hardware preview of Doom 3...
It's going to be tough to compete with that engine, and it's going to take a lot of time.
From a more modern point of view..
Viewtiful Joe. Love the box art. More than likely because I love the art style. Same with Disgaea.
Final Fantasy, at least in Japan. I love the logos. The name of the game in that crystallized text, with a picture representation of a game element in the background. (X had Yuna's sending dance, VII had a comet, VI had a Magitec armor. etc)
That's pretty much the best in my book. Everything else kind of blends together.
Yeah, pretty much. It's all moral philosophy really. I happen to love that, to each their own.
That said, my second favorite genre, is what I call the Viewtiful genre. Basically cool stuff games. Viewtiful Joe, Devil May Cry, Ninja Gaiden, etc.
Games that you get a rewarding sense of pure style from.
I'm also a big Miyamoto/Nintendo fan, but it's not all roses.. (Wind Waker, SMB 3/Yoshi's Island), there's a few thorns. (Super Mario Sunshine, the N64 Zelda's, which were stiff and played like crap.
As a big-RPG buff, personally, I don't see where the problem is. Maybe it's that the genere is becoming less popular, whatever. I don't think it is personally.
Is the genre getting old? No, of course not. On both fronts, better things are coming out all the time. Domestically, games like KOTOR are coming out that are probably more ambitious than ever before. I don't particularly like those games, they're too much hack and slash for my taste, but whatever.
On the Japaneese side, there's all the whining..yes whining, about how "linear" they are, no replayablity, whatever. They don't get it. What a JRPG, Final Fantasy style mostly is, it's a new form of book. It gives a story the length of an epic novel, but a graphical representation of that. There was no more replayability in the old days, there never was. Not that there IS no replayability, it's just what you make out of it.
Are the stories getting worse? Not really. Actually, to my mind they're getting more ambitious. The bar keeps rising. Of course, there's the throw away stuff, but then again, there's the great stuff.
For my mind, the whole epic of FFX and FFX-2 (Which is NOT a light happy throw-away game. If they did it without the "light" style, the game would have been too dark. As it is it straddles the line..) is one of the best stories I've ever experienced. Sure the game is linear. But it's supposed to be that way. It's a story to experience wrapped up in an entertaining combat mode.
If you don't like it, fine. But it's always been that way.
Both assume that somehow the RIAA should play nice with alternative distribution/promotion methods, and somehow that they are trying to do that, just going about it the wrong way.
Frankly, that's foolish.
The RIAA has absolutly nothing to gain by releasing the promotional controls they have over the industry. Why? Because it completly removes all their power. P2P/Webcasting make the threat of the next big thing coming up outside their reach very possible...and possibly very likly.
The fight over P2P and webcasting is not intended to raise money in the short term, it's intended to monopolize the promotional channels to ensure their long-term relevence.
DS.. all the way..
I think the PSP is one of those examples of Sony trying to be too cute. Relying on unproven technology and thinking they can force it through, especially when it's going to be relativly expensive.
As a gaming machine it'll be pretty cool, but it's going to be marketed at a wider basis, which is really going to dull its impact.
The DS, because of its backwards compatibility, will be somewhat popular, although to be honest, it's Game Boy 2.5. GBC being 1.5, Advance 2, and the DS 2.5. You'll see some games, but it'll be a mix between Advance and regular GBA.
I would say, that with a downgrade in graphics, and a few slight tweaks, this is basically Final Fantasy XI. Not that this is a BAD thing....
Actually, that guild system seems like too much of a pain. I like the Linkshell I'm in FFXI, tons of people, always helping each other out, like a strong large community, always growing, and there's no real motive for us not to grow, meet new people and join together.
No PvP is a big improvement 'tho...PvP attracts the immature set..
The only problem I had with the article (it went through the whole blogosphere, as we call it, yesterday), is the assumption that blogs are somehow more "biased".
They're not.
The biggest bias in modern media, is the fairness bias. In essense, they take all claims, regardless of any sort of factual truth to them, as being equally valid. That's the bias that these blogs tend to throw right out. And by doing so, they often times come up with analysis that is way above what mainstream pundits are doing.
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With their #1. Disgaea is just an amazing game. It's better than the sum of its parts. It's just a whole lot of fun, with a lot of nice touches. (The end-of-chapter Etna parodies are frankly hilarious.)
I'm not a fan of FF Tactics. The battle engine just doesn't..SING..ya know?
However, there are two big omissions.
#1. Shining Force whatever. Great SRPG. You get enough characters, and they each have their use, to really customize their force. They don't all blend together.
#2. Dark Wizard for the Sega CD. This was a huge SRPG. Hex-grid based, you'd summon and hire warriors and monsters, and so would the enemy. You had to march your army, 30 or so creatures, across the field, and take out the enemy commander (who is tough as nails).
Great music as well.
No, it didn't only happen when Relm sketched an invisible creature.
It also happened if Relm sketched a certain enemy, Zone Eater I believe it was called (The enemy if it sucked your entire team down, you went into the cave where you could find Gogo.
When you did that, your whole inventory and/or saved games could/would be messed up. Things like 255 of certain items you couldn't even get.
Mind you, being 14 at the time, it wasn't a bug, but a feature.
It's actually kind of funny. Half the people shit on SquareEnix for innovating, while the other half shit on them for being too strage.
:)
6 of one, half a dozen of the other
BTW, the parent obviously has no clue about video games, thinking that the various Mario/FF games are "rethreads".
Pfft.
I'm not saying that there's a problem with it.
But I think it's something that's swept under the rug a lot, I think. I don't think it should be banned, I think it's a right we all have to sell the things we paid for.
But at the same time, when I purchase media, the MAIN reason I do that is to reward the producer. If I wanted just to have it and not reward the producer, I'd just go download it. Seriously.
I think it does have to do with the amount that people are willing to pay. However, it seems that ANY discount from an original shrink-wrapped copy is really just pissing in the wind..isn't it?