The whole point of E3 is to show off games to the media and to the retailers. That is the whole point of the article. It has strayed from it's purpose, mainly because so many unimportant people are now going that it is impossible to *do* your job, when that is the whole point of the show.
Oh, please. If the guy thinks that's the point of a trade show, then he needs to grow up. For most people in the game industry, E3 is a chance to let off steam. And E3 is not for journalists; it's for the industry. Sure, they've got a job to do too, but they're there, away from home, 24 hours a day for a week straight, and many of them are working both before and after the doors close at the convention center. What the hell does this guy expect? People are people. It's not the rest of the industry's responsibility to be quiet so this one small-time video game writer can do his job.
Trade shows in every industry are a way for people in the industry to get together and schmooze. They're basically a big-ass party with a secondary agenda of selling products. That's true of every big trade show I could name. It should be more true of the game industry because the whole point of the products on display is to have fun. If you're going to a video game trade show thinking you're going to hunker down and do some serious work about serious products, then you are frankly in the wrong industry and at the wrong type of event.
The guy says he's been to two E3's and at his first he was barely old enough to get in. So he clearly hasn't been part of the industry for long, nor has he even been in the workforce for long. Once he gets a little older he'll realize that what he's arguing against is exactly what these events are for. Just because people are having fun (in whatever way they choose to) doesn't mean they're not buying or selling products at the same time. A lot of back-room deals get done at E3.
That said, is E3 as much fun as it's cracked up to be? In my experience, going once is enough. It's like that all-weekend party your friend throws where you get so drunk you can't make it to work for the next week and you swear you're done with partying for the rest of your life. That feeling wears off after a while and eventually you do it again and then you remember why you said you weren't going to after the last time. Then you don't do it anymore.
For most people I know who have gone (and for me too), once at E3 is enough, twice is too much. But it's a good experience to have, and it can and should be a lot of fun. It's just a little too much to do every year.
I still think E3 should just be open to the public, though (as I said in another post), rather than keeping up this pretense of it being only for industry types, when it obviously isn't. All the pretense does is piss off people who think they're more deserving than others of being there. Give journos one day for themselves with the publishers and manufacturers, and then open it up to the public.
Fine, I bet there are thousands of people willing to take their place.
You know what? You're being sarcastic, but let's look at this seriously for a minute.
The Tokyo Game Show is open to the public. And despite a couple of rough years, it is now drawing larger crowds than ever. It absolutely dwarfs E3 in both the number of visitors and the physical size of the show (I've been to both, several times). Obviously, in Japan it is considered far more important than E3, both from an industry standpoint and because 150,000 real consumers get to try out your games and it's a good bet that if they like them, they will buy them.
E3 seems like a wasted opportunity as it's set up now. So people get to read about games, big deal. That's not going to convince anybody to buy anything. Open the show up. Let everybody in.
TGS also does have a day that is only open to journalists. So it's not like they need to compete with the crowds. If you are a journalist, that day is actually pretty amazing, because there are only about 10,000 people in a space that's about the size of Central Park in Manhattan. And on that day you get to see all the games that aren't ready for primetime yet too, so it's not like you're missing anything you might otherwise see at a closed-off show.
E3 was created as an industry trade show - it was not intended as a journalistic event, so it shouldn't be thought of that way. But as it's grown into a show where games are presented to the public often for the first time, it seems like it'd be a good idea to get the public directly involved, and also to give journalists a day to themselves.
1) You need the best possible quality but have no access to a print shop which can deliver it. Reality is that most cheap print shops will not deliver accurate color even if you jump through all the hoops.
True, and this lets me ask the question - what online print shops *do* allow you to actually use ICC color profiles? I'm sure there are some pro-oriented shops that do, I just don't know which ones. Are there any that are as easy to use/fast/cheap as Kodak (Ofoto), or Shutterfly?
I have used both Ofoto (wish they'd kept that name) and Shutterfly, and they're easy and quick but the prints are snapshot quality at best. Shutterfly always adds a yellow cast. Ofoto at least does not add a cast but the results are unpredictable.
2) You print material isn't supposed to be seen by anybody else. Print shops have access to the images and will usually check prints.
DEFINITELY true:)
It's a total mistake to assume that nobody's going to handle your prints at one of these photo printers. If nothing else, it's highly likely that somebody is going to physically pick up your stack of prints from the printer and stuff them in an envelope. It's pretty likely that your prints will be quickly checked to at least make sure there were no obvious errors (like only half a photo being printed). People *are* gonna see your prints, just like they did in the days of film processing at your local drug store.
Personally, I do a mix of both home and online printing, depending on the photo. I do get the best results when printing myself, although I am *sure* I do pay more. For example, I printed out some of my and my wife's wedding photos myself to give out to close friends and family, and then printed the same photos through Ofoto to give to others. The Ofoto prints were okay, but on my own prints I was able to get the colors, contrast and brightness to exactly match what I wanted. Of course, I had to do about 10 test runs before I managed that, and even once I got things set up right, about every other print had some sort of smudge or other imperfection. (Part of that's my printer, but part of it's almost just endemic to home inkjet printing.) So I have no doubt that given all the paper and ink I used, I probably paid at least a buck a print for my own prints, vs. 19 cents or whatever it was for the Ofoto prints. But I did end up with better quality from my prints.
..amongst the 1% of users who a) know what region codes are and b) are affected adversely by their presence in day-to-day use.
But these people are the early adopters - tech-savy users with sufficient free cash.
Well, not only that, but this is a very western-centric way of thinking (and more specifically, US-centric). Why should people in Japan, for example, be forced to wait 6 months for a DVD release in their "region" and then pay $60 for it, when they can buy the US disc for 11 bucks from Amazon? Region-coding is one form of price-fixing.
The vast majority of DVD players sold around the world these days are region-free, including from major DVD Forum members like Panasonic, Sony and Toshiba (on other continents). It's really only the US that's still clinging to this concept, because the Hollywood studios want it and US consumers generally aren't affected too much by it (unless you are, like me, a fan of foreign films and music). But even here, I can walk down to my corner deli and buy a region-free player for $50. So really, the only people who put up with region controls right now are the people that want to.
Region controls are unnecessary, anti-consumer, and really basically useless anyway. It's the movie industry's attempt at keeping the global economy at bay. Well, they're finally just going to have to adjust. If they want to sell DVD's only to people in certain regions, they just have to make them appeal to people in those regions. (For example, I'd still likely buy US-produced discs for the most part because the menus will be in English and the price will be lower. The industry would probably have to adjust more in places like Japan, but that could only mean lower prices for consumers there - in any case, consumers win.)
If this is really true about HD-DVD, then I think it will be a *big* boost for the format worldwide. And it will tip the balance for those early adopters here too, as you rightly point out... and we're the ones that tell all our friends what to buy. I was pretty firmly in the Blu-Ray camp before, but I'll switch in a second if HD-DVD truly has no region locks.
Who says their target market is teenagers anyway??
The problem is those teenagers eventually grow into adults. It's the McDonalds' theory of marketing. You hook 'em when they're young, and they'll keep coming back and then bring their kids as they become adults. And the cycle begins again.
If the cycle is broken, that's the end of everything. You lose the kids as they grow into adults, and you never hook that next generation.
I'm not convinced there's any real shift going on, though; I think it's probably just the end of the console cycle. I will say that I personally think video games have lately gotten generally more boring and repetitive, with lots of cookie-cutter FPS's and RPG's along with the yearly sports games updates taking most of the top sales slots, and that it's possible that some larger demographic shift is happening, but I still think it's more likely that the excitement will come back once the new consoles are out.
I don't pretend to have a source on this, but I cannot think of a single English word that begins with a 'g' followed by a vowel that has a soft g (i.e. a 'j' sound) as opposed to a hard g (i.e. a 'guh' sound).
Sure, it's mostly "ge" words, but what about Gibraltar? (As in "the rock of".) Gin? (As in the alcoholic beverage or the card game.) I mean these are just off the top of my head.
There's no rule in English that says a "g" followed by a vowel must be a hard "g". And people were saying "jiff" long before I ever heard anybody pronounce it with a hard "g". It's an acronym; acronyms do not need to take the exact same pronunciation as the words the individual letters stand for.
The original pronunciation was "jiff" and as far as I'm concerned that's still the correct pronunciation. I mean at some point, if everybody pronounces a word differently than you simply say the language has changed and move on. But enough people still use the original pronunciation that I still consider it correct - I mean if a certain percentage of people started pronouncing "gin" with a hard "g", I think the rest of the people are just gonna think they're a bunch of morons, right? Why is this different? To me, pronouncing "GIF" with a hard "g" labels you as a newbie - it tells me you first heard of the format after others had started using that pronunciation, and you've probably surrounded yourself with other newbies who use that same incorrect pronunciation.
Video game designers usually pay below market rate in other CS disciplines, because they have such a high number of people wanting to work in their industry. Especially for the entry level jobs.
I worked for a major publisher in New York for several years (you figure out which; there is only one) and I don't know anybody there who made less than $50,000 per year regardless of experience level. Now, I didn't know everybody at the company, and I didn't know everybody's salary even among my friends and acquaintances, but nobody there felt like salaries were the problem.
In fact, the impression I got from working there was that this particular publisher, at least, paid higher than average salaries (compared with other industries) specifically so that they'd be able to demand more of the workers in terms of hours worked. There was no such thing as a 40 hour work week. If anybody complained, the implicit (if not explicit) response from management would be "go try finding a company that'll pay you as much as we do for the work you do."
People who say this is about the money are really missing the point. This lawsuit was not about money, because salaries in the game industry are actually fairly high. This lawsuit was about time, and maybe more importantly, the respect of an employees' time when they're not supposed to be at work. I think most people would agree that there is a point at which almost no amount of money makes a job worth it anymore. If you're asked to work, say, 167 hours per week (that's every single hour of every week, minus an hour per week for sleep), but your employer will pay you $1 million per year, is that worth it? I would turn that down. Maybe I could do it for a week just to make a quick few thousand bucks, but after that I'd probably be almost literally dead.
So the goal of this lawsuit was really to force EA to acknowledge that employees have their own time too. And if EA wants a chunk of that time, they have to ask, and it's going to cost them. They're not just going to get it for free anymore. Maybe that will cause them to think twice about forcing what amounts to slave labor conditions on their work force in the first place.
And on another note, the US should not necessarily control the internet. It is used by many people around the world. Its not even like the US invented it, either...
Huh? You can't be serious. The US didinvent the internet, and has always owned and controlled the root servers. ICANN was created to take direct government control out of the equation, but it is still overseen by the US government (I'm not sure which branch, but I think it's the commerce department).
I, frankly, think the EU and UN are acting like a couple of spoiled children. "wah wah wah, we want the internet! wah wah!" Sheesh. We designed it, we built it, we control it. End of story. If they want to use it, great, and they should be thankful to us, like they should be thankful to us for a great many things, for opening it up to everybody around the world. There was no requirement for us to do so, just like there is no requirement for us to turn over root server control now. If we choose to, that's our business. If we don't, that's our business too.
I'd like to see what happens if the UN passes a resolution "requiring" us to turn over server control. Let's see them enforce that. It'll be just another example of how far beyond the UN's original mandate that organization has gone, and how useless and impotent it has become as a result.
A grouping of game elements into substance and style is somewhat useful, but really couldn't anyone with a decent knowledge of game development have figured it out?
Well, apparently not, because I don't think Gamasutra quite got it.
A game's substance has nothing to do with how a bullet travels through the air. That kind of thinking is why we're all stuck with cookie-cutter FPS's, sports and racing games these days. People (including most developers) mistake genre conventions for substance. That's still part of a game's style.
The reason we're stuck in this rut of game development today is that developers think they can look at existing games, alter minute stylistic details like how a bullet travels through the air and call it a new game.
The substance of a game is much more fundamental than that, i.e. what is the player avatar (a character, a ball, a group of ants?), what is the goal of the game, what is the gameplay mechanic required to reach that goal. Many developers simply skip these fundamental questions and start out with a pre-made template based on existing genres - these developers are not creating substance at all, they are simply making a stylistic alteration to a set of existing conventions.
he would confirm only eight games as being available the same day and date as the Xbox 360: Project Gotham Racing 3, Kameo, Perfect Dark Zero, Madden NFL 06, NBA Live 06, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06, Need for Speed Most Wanted, and FIFA 06: Road to FIFA World Cup.
Let me be the first (or maybe not?) to say "meh!"
And to this Wolfenstein announcement, again "meh!" How many more first-person shooters do we really need? It's not as if anybody was clamoring for another Wolf sequel after the last one (which was basically a dud, even by cookie-cutter FPS standards).
So we've got a few sports games, a racing game or two, a couple FPS's and Kameo, which was announced like 5 years ago and has now made the switch from two different systems to the 360. Yawn! Double-yawn!
Not even an attempt at innovation here. Nothing that's any different from what's available right now, except for higher resolutions. I'll take Katamari Damacy over any one of these games. Heck, give me KD in high-def and I'll sign up so fast for an Xbox 360 it'll make your head spin. But not one of these announced titles has me excited in the slightest.
Remember back when every successive generation of consoles allowed for totally new types of gameplay that we'd never seen before? You couldn't even do a Super Mario or Sonic type game until the NES/SMS. You couldn't do first-person stuff until the SNES with its scaling capabilities (which the Genesis tried to emulate later, especially with the Sega CD add-on). You couldn't do 3D until the Saturn and PlayStation. It all started slowing down with the current generation, and now it seems like all we're getting are sequels and rehashes that play exactly the same as what came before even on brand new machines.
I'll probably eventually buy a 360 and a PS2 (and a Revolution) because that's just what I do, and also because I do want high-def. But jesus, it's like developers (including MS's in-house teams) aren't even trying anymore.
But netflix takes time. I sent my movies back yesterday, and I won't have my new ones until tomorrow. If you want the movie today (or don't want to subscribe to a service or sign a blockbuster rental agreement), the disposable disc is a good option.
Gotta explain that one to me.
First of all, how many DVD's can you watch in a day? Unless you don't work or go to school (in other words, you just sit on your ass all day), I can't see how you'd watch 3 movies in one day and then have nothing left to watch. I (like most people) am lucky if I get through 3 DVD's in a week! And I just send them back as I watch, so I always have one or two new DVD's on the pile.
Second, the point of Netflix isn't speed, it's convenience. Sometimes people mistake one for the other, but they are not the same thing. I can put a DVD into my mailbox and magically, through the wonders of the US Postal Service, another one appears there in the same spot 2 days later. I don't need to go one inch out of my way or spend one single minute downloading or otherwise dealing with my movies. The whole point is I don't have to go out and buy or rent anything. Otherwise I'd just go to Blockbuster in the first place, so a disposable disc isn't going to help me any.
I'll stick with netflix, but some people will be better served by this method.
"Some" people will be served by almost anything. But what is your definition of "some"? Is three people a "some"? Is that enough to sustain a business? What about 10,000? 50,000? 100,000?
It doesn't matter that there are "some" people out there that would like this. I think it's been proven time and time again that most people have decided that they don't, or wouldn't. There are not nearly enough people interested in this to make it viable.
That's not even taking into account the fact that rental stores have no incentive to carry these things because they cut out a major source of revenue (even BB's "no late fees" promotion really has late fees... you pay $25 or whatever for the movie if you keep it out too long, then a restocking fee if you finally return it), and force them to continuously buy new inventory. Retailers that deal in sales only have little incentive either because the margins are so low. Would you rather sell discs that carry a profit of $5 per unit or discs that carry a profit of 50 cents per disc? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out.
And of course, there's the incompatibility thing, which basically makes the whole format a non-starter to begin with.
This is at least the third time this has been tried and both previous attempts (that I know of) failed utterly and spectactularly.
(Any other attempts would also have been failures; I just don't know about them if they occurred.)
Even the Dreamcast 360 label seems a little silly now. The Dreamcast was another dead before it hit the shelves console, but I don't think Sega could have had more disasters with their Dreamcast pre-launch if they had tried.
I don't think we will ever see a console launch disaster of this magnitude ever again.
That's revisionist. There was nothing wrong with the Dreamcast launch. If you're talking about the internal competition and arguments that went on prior to launch, that's just par for the course. The good news in the DC's case was that the best product out of all those considered did make it to market. It had a modem, it had the better 3D chip, it had the better industrial design between the two designs Sega had.
The DC launched in the US with a bunch of great games (around 20 of them, as I recall), including stuff like Soul Calibur, Sonic Adventure, and NFL2K. It was a good launch, I'd have to say. You're looking back on it now through 20/20 hindsight and attaching a reason to the system's overall failure that nobody could have foreseen at the time.
But if you want parallels between the Dreamcast and Xbox 360, there's a big one: Peter Moore. The one big mistake Sega made with the Dreamcast was thinking being first meant something, and MS is making the same mistake with the Xbox 360. I don't doubt for a second that a lot of that is Peter Moore.
The MS launch run-up has been a lot more chaotic and unfocused than even the DC launch run-up. It's more similar to the Saturn launch, which will probably always be the worst console launch in the history of gaming. MS won't even come close, no matter how badly they botch the 360 - at least we know the launch date! But there are some definite parallels there too, including a rush to beat competitors, a lack of firm launch titles, some unimpressive run-up events light on specifics, etc.
Well, at least it can ONLY affect florida. -sigh- guess i won't be buying games in florida on vacation anymore.
I guess I won't be going on vacation in Florida anymore. It's apparently ok in Florida to shoot people for any reason you like, but it's gonna be jail time if you sell the wrong video games?
Not to sound prejudiced against 1/50 of my fellow countrymen or anything, but this is not a state that should exist on this Earth. Can we at least dig a moat or something to symbolically separate ourselves from these people?
Well not everyone realizes that the XBox bombed in Japan. All they see is it's relative success in the US and then wonder why Microsoft is taking a loss. I dunno if they would have been in the black by now if the XBox was a success over seas, but I am sure they hoped and expected it to do better than it did.
I don't really have any doubt that they would have been closer to their forecasts (and to predictions of a $2 billion loss rather than a $4 billion loss) if they'd done better in Japan. They seem to be pretty close to their sales forecasts for the US and Europe, but it is really hard to understate how badly they've done in Japan. They are not even considered a major player there - people talk about them there in the same way we talk about the Tiger Telematics Gizmondo here. I mean, what are you gonna buy, a PSP, a DS, or a Gizmondo? That's how the Japanese feel about the Xbox, and the sales pretty much show that. The system's basically a joke there. It's got less than 1% market share.
I think MS learned some things from this as they're at least paying lip service to the country now and promising to refocus. They put on a big, somewhat pushy show at TGS that I personally think was a bit too "in your face" for the Japanese (even forcing Xbox bags on people right as they got off the train in Makuhari), but that sort of illustrates their continuing problems there. I think they understand that Japan is tough and they understand that they need to do better there, but I don't think they really have any clue whatsoever how to go about doing that. It's amazing to me that such a large multi-national corporation could be so out of touch with such a major market. I mean, just head-hunt some of Apple's guys, or something - there are plenty of American corporations that do well over there. It just requires an understanding of Japanese tastes, which it still seems like MS doesn't have.
I seem to recall a news article back in the day that said that Microsoft was going to risk five billion dollars on it's entry into the marketplace, but I can't find it anymore.
Not sure what you were reading, but the figure I saw repeatedly was "as much as" $2 billion, such as in this article here.
$2 billion was already a chunk of change. Now it's double that, and they never did get into the black. Clearly something is not right at that division, and it really does make you wonder about the financial prospects of the Xbox 360. (Note that that's different from marketplace prospects; obviously, MS could keep this money-losing charade up basically forever, though at some point you'd think investors would expect some real returns.)
No doubt they learned some things from their Xbox experience, but we'll see if any of that actually translates to profits. Which is all that really matters in business, in the end.
There was also some cop game on the Genesis that came with a revolver-styled lightgun, which was very good as well... but I can't think of its name.
Lethal Enforcers. Didn't sell all that well.
HotD2 on DC didn't sell all that well either. In fact gun games haven't sold all that well for a lot of years. It's a niche genre at this point. (Note that this is not a qualitative judgment; I love gun games, and own many of them.)
btw, I gotta take at least a little bit of an issue with the headline here - the GunCon is a specific brand of light gun made by Namco. The reason why people like it is that it hooks directly into your TV signal, unlike most light guns that simply read what's on your TV screen. This makes the GunCon series (really just two models) extremely accurate compared to other light guns.
So when I read the headline about new "GunCon concepts" for the Revolution, I was excited at what Namco had cooking, especially given that it implied at the same time that they were working on gun games for the Revolution. No such luck, obviously; this is simply an article with renders of generic light guns that aren't from anybody in particular.
It'd be nice if somebody could fix the headline. The way it's worded now is really no different than talking about a new Dual Shock controller for the Xbox, or a new Wavebird for the PS3, when you're really just talking about generic controllers.
Seems to me the main problem is the number of problems. You have the input method problem, the screen size problem, the compatable periferal problem, the external storage problem and the performance problems.
None of which apparently affect Japan, where mobile phones are the primary method of accessing the internet and personal data.
It's really difficult to understate how much more advanced the Japanese mobile phone industry is than that of any other country (and especially the United States). The problem for the rest of the world that's trying to catch up is that the mobile phone culture has grown in Japan around the idea of the phone as a central hub, whereas it's the opposite in other countries. Learning to use a mobile phone as hub for those of us in the US is like learning a second language. It's not intuitive for us like it is for them.
But if you want to look at some of the solutions they've come up with for the problems you've listed, they're easily apparent for all to see. The input issue is something that's both better and worse in Japan... typing on a computer keyboard is hardly all that fast to begin with there (you need to type the hiragana, then select kanji combinations from long lists for every word), so mobile phones are not really much different. Screen sizes there are simply bigger than they are here, as is screen quality. 3.2" QVGA screens are pretty much standard. Phones sell based on speed and interface so that's not an issue either (phones with poor interfaces - such as those from Motorola and Nokia - simply don't sell). And external storage is handled in the same way it's handled here - offsite or on a separate PC.
People do use computers in Japan. But for most people, mobile phones handle 90% of everything they could want to do with a PC. Email, web browsing (via high-speed networks), game playing, etc. There are a huge number of mobile-oriented web sites in Japan - in fact, you really can't design a site in Japan without having a mobile version these days that duplicates all of the functions and most of the look and feel of the real thing. And I'm not just talking single HTML pages, I'm talking about sites that offer real web services via mobile. So there's no dearth of content. Many phones also have TV tuners, almost all phones have java, and most phones have 3D graphics capabilities.
One other thing, which I think is both interesting and important: their cell phones often do more than most "smart" phones in the US, yet they both cost less than US market cell phones and they are not PDA-based. Their smart-phones grew from the cell phone form factor, whereas ours have grown from the PDA. So we pay more and our phones are less stylish - and style is a huge deal in Japan. (I also think it's a bigger deal here than manufacturers seem to think, and it's one reason why smart-phones here don't sell as well as they could. Put smart-phone type capabilities in a RAZR-like package with a QVGA screen and a 3 megapixel camera and sell it for $300-$400 and you'll sell a crazy number of units. That's what the Japanese industry does.)
It's still debateable whether it works better to have one big laptop that does 100% of what you want, or whether it's better to have a PC at home to act as a storage and sync device and then to have a bunch of smaller devices (phone, iPod, Game Boy or PSP) to do everything else. In Japan, it's kind of important to have a very small device that you can use on the train to do things like check email and browse the web. You really can't use a laptop, nor do most people want to lug one around. And as an extension of that, over time the carriers and phone manufacturers have added other entertainment-related functions to help people get through those down times.
I don't know that the culture is ever going to change here, and I don't know that it should either. There are fewer things people really need to use cell phones for here - the train situation, where you've got about one square foot of standing space
Microsoft didn't praise the controller. One guy who happens to work at Microsoft praised the controller.
One guy acting as Microsoft's representative "praised" the controller. It's not stupid to suggest "Microsoft" praised the controller. Peter Moore is Microsoft in this context. He is the VP in charge of Xbox marketing, and he was speaking on company time.
Now, I put "praised" in quotes because it's obvious that this was pretty backhanded (it's not "debateable", as Zonk said it was, it's completely obvious what he meant). This is not the kind of praise I'd want if somebody said something similar about me. (As in, "that's a nice attempt at building a bookshelf" or "that's a nice attempt at a good haircut.") But the distinction you're trying to make between "one guy" and the company of Microsoft is meaningless.
While there are some games that are artistic, maybe if we saw some topselling games that didn't feature easter eggs that were sex scenes with hookers, rewards for stealing cars, or woman that look at all realistic, instead of Lara Croft with her need for a cantilevered bra, people might start taking games seriously.
Bingo! I had ctrl-c'd the exact same sentence you had all ready to make pretty much the same reply you did. So allow me to just expand upon it a little bit further.
In my experience, when most people talk about "artistic merit" where it applies to games, it's in the context of "government action", as in the case of this post. The government has only even talked about acting in the cases of M-rated games, most of which are *at best* artistically questionable. (Note that I'm not saying that's *because* they're M-rated, but it is true in my experience that unlike the film industry with its R rating, most M-rated games are M-rated because M-rated content sells better, not because the "art" required it.)
In other words, whoever makes this argument is barking up the wrong tree. If you want to talk about the artistic merits of a game like Katamari Damacy or Rez, that's great. But these are not the kinds of games anybody is talking about regulating. So it's a little disingenuous to suggest that it's hard for anybody to accept the "artistic merit" of games based on games that have no artistic merit.
Now, it's a little different thing to argue that you just shouldn't be regulating anything, because artistic merit is subjective at best. But this is the real world, not fantasy land. If the game industry wants people to recognize games as art, then they should start treating their own products that way. As it is, for the most part games are simply commodities, designed to sell as many copies as possible. If developers could fix upon one magic formula that would guarantee sales of 10 million units every time, they would use it every time, regardless of how artistic that formula was, or how artistic re-using that formula over and over was. (Does this sound familiar to anyone? This is the ideal game publishers have been working towards for about the last 10 or 15 years.)
Art is speech and speech should not be regulated. Commodity products, however, are a different story - in fact, commodity products can be and are regulated, in every industry. And when those commodity products contain almost nothing but prurient content designed for no other reason than to attract the attention (and dollars) of immature males, then it's really hard to argue that they should be protected from anything.
Art is art. Games are not art, with a few exceptions. If the industry wants games to be considered art, then they should make them that way. The fact is, right now at least, they don't.
AAC is not a bad format, in fact it is significantly better than MP3 from a quality at bitrate perspective.
Not according to this test. There is a slight difference, but not enough to be noticeable in most cases, and nothing just a few more kbps wouldn't cure.
That test (which I took part in) pretty much convinced me to just stick with mp3 using the latest LAME. All this junk about mp3 being "obsolete" is just marketing hooey - it sounds better than WMA at the same bit rate, it sounds about the same as AAC at the same bit rate, and the only codecs that are significantly better are MPC and Vorbis, and good luck finding a portable player that supports either of those. Again though, nothing a few extra kbps in an mp3 encode couldn't overcome. (It should also be noted that both MPC and Vorbis sound better than AAC too.)
mp3 is still the best codec to use because while technically proprietary, it's basically universal. Even Sony, which was the lone real holdout, is now on board with mp3. Given that it's really no worse than AAC and is actually better than WMA, I really don't see why you'd want to use either alternative given that they both only work with a subset of portable players. If I decide to sell my iPod and buy a Sony player one day (not likely, but you never know), all my music will still work fine and I will not have to re-rip (or re-purchase!) any of it.
btw, I actually gave up about halfway through that listening test because on many of the songs I couldn't tell the difference between *any* of the codecs. (Results were accepted on a per-song basis, so you didn't need to submit results for everything to be counted.) I felt like I probably was usually able to pick out the ATRAC track because there was always one that was noticeably worse than the others, but otherwise all of the tracks of a given song sounded pretty much the same to me. And I'm a pretty critical listener.
That test convinced me that there are just a whole lot of myths about audio codecs floating around out there.
I'm using the term "proprietary" loosely, of course... but buy into any media format that's tied to one specific device, and it's a given that someday you're going to have a stack of media that you can't play and a much lighter bank account to go with it.
Spirited Away requires some understanding of bath houses and kami to fully enjoy.
Yeah, I was kind of surprised that someone else described that as the most western-friendly. To me, it's the one film that requires the most understanding of Japanese culture in general (not just bath houses and kami) to enjoy. You can still enjoy it without that understanding, but you won't really fully "get" it.
All of Miyazaki's films have an underlying theme or moral. I have yet to find an American who really understood what Spirited Away was saying on the first viewing... and I must admit the only reason I probably did was that I watched it first in Japan surrounded by Japanese speakers. (So I both had it explained to me - I didn't understand all the dialogue - and I got to hear the impressions of a lot of other people in the theater afterwards.) Most people in the west seem to describe it as a run-of-the-mill "coming of age" fantasy, which it most certainly is not.
So I wouldn't start with that one. I think it's actually kind of an advanced Miyazaki film - there's a lot of subtext, a lot of cultural specificity, and while the underlying theme is relatively simple (it's a film about gluttony and greed), it seems like the way it's presented is not all that easy for westerners to grasp.
Same is actually true of Nausicaa, which has a lot of Cold War stuff mixed in and that kind of gets lost in translation, and maybe even forgotten now that the cold war is over...
I do agree that Mononoke is a good place to start. It's pretty simple, but it doesn't seem simple as you're watching it. It's beautifully animated, it's still relevant, and the plot itself is pretty imaginative, though easy to follow. It's also not really culturally-specific - I mean there are a few things (like the little guys running around the forest, I can't even remember what they're called), but nothing that gets in the way of following the story or understanding the theme. And you can imagine a similar sort of plot set in the west at that time.
Kiki and Porco Rosso are good too, although they're a bit lighter and may give newcomers a bit of a skewed idea of what Miyazaki's really all about. Laputa I just didn't think held up all that well the last time I saw it; the animation is not his best, and the story doesn't flow as well as some of his later films.
Totoro might be the one of his films (well, other than Howl's Moving Castle) that I haven't seen, so I can't comment on it.
Re the vice-versa, it's interesting to speculate if and when Miyazaki will do something in CGI.
Miyazaki has been using CGI since at least Mononoke Hime, if not before. He just doesn't go overboard with it, and he uses it in a way such that it's not noticeable unless you're specifically looking for it.
Again, something I think Hollywood could learn from. Even in live-action films, CGI effects have taken on a life of their own. It used to be that special effects were used to make something look real that otherwise couldn't be done. Nowadays, CGI effects are used for the sake of the effect - there's not even any intent to make something look real, the intent is instead to draw attention to the effect.
In animation, the idea has always been to make something beautiful but to use the animation to tell a story. The visuals are subservient; the better they look, the better for the film, but the whole reason the visuals exist is to help tell a story. Once the visuals start distracting from that story, and people start paying attention more to the look of a film than the story it's telling, then the film is a failure. Miyazaki is one of the few remaining animation directors that seem to understand that animation is no different than live action in this regard - that film, including animation, is a medium for telling stories. It is not a CGI showcase. (Hollywood seems to have forgotten this fact in live-action films lately too.)
This is the way I feel about at least some of Pixar's films. I saw Toy Story and I just didn't get it. The comedy was way over-broad in that bad TV sitcom sort of way, and it seemed to me that the only real unique thing about the film was its all-CGI visuals. Most of the reviews I saw at the time spent a lot of time talking about the visuals and very little talking about the story, except for the comedy, which I just didn't even think was very funny.
(There are Pixar films I think are pretty good - I liked Finding Nemo, for example - but in general they just spend way too much time worrying about the technical aspects of their films and not nearly enough on telling a good story.)
But there have been CGI scenes in at least the last several of Miyazaki's films, when he's wanted to do something that couldn't be done by traditional hand-drawn techniques. He just doesn't believe in doing things for the sake of doing it, he believes in doing what needs to be done to tell the story he wants to tell. Miyazaki's films are great because he first of treats them as films and not simply as "anime" (or "animation", which is all that word means in Japan), and second of all because he understands what filmmaking is really all about.
A good place to start would be many of it's filters and effects. Some of those filters are available for Photoshop as well, but require some hunting and some extra capital.
What filters and effects specifically? Adobe only includes the ones that are actually necessary, and a subset of "creative" filters that people seem to still use even though they shouldn't. These are mainly leftovers from as long as 10 years ago.
A lot of people would be happy if Adobe would dump most of their stock filters altogether. People rely on these way too much. There are only a few that are actually useful and leaving the other ones in there only encourages people to be lazy and/or to try to be more "creative" than they actually are.
Gimp has features that make it comparable to Illustrator in some respects, as opposed to just Photoshop comparisons.
Now, if Adobe combined Photoshop and Illustrator...
This makes no sense whatsoever. Photoshop is a raster editor, Illustrator is a vector editor. The Gimp does vector illustrations? That's news to me (it may be the case these days, it's just news to me if it is).
There is no real logical way to combine raster and vector editors; they require two totally different sets of tools.
Maybe you meant Photoshop and ImageReady? That would make more sense, and I agree that these two should be combined.
The Gimp is never going to get anywhere against Photoshop though, good UI or not, until it supports 16 bit images. It is utterly useless for a lot of people without that. I don't mean it's not as good as Photoshop, I mean if you have 16 bit images, it's useless. Basically rules it out right there for professional use.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole point of E3 is to show off games to the media and to the retailers. That is the whole point of the article. It has strayed from it's purpose, mainly because so many unimportant people are now going that it is impossible to *do* your job, when that is the whole point of the show.
Oh, please. If the guy thinks that's the point of a trade show, then he needs to grow up. For most people in the game industry, E3 is a chance to let off steam. And E3 is not for journalists; it's for the industry. Sure, they've got a job to do too, but they're there, away from home, 24 hours a day for a week straight, and many of them are working both before and after the doors close at the convention center. What the hell does this guy expect? People are people. It's not the rest of the industry's responsibility to be quiet so this one small-time video game writer can do his job.
Trade shows in every industry are a way for people in the industry to get together and schmooze. They're basically a big-ass party with a secondary agenda of selling products. That's true of every big trade show I could name. It should be more true of the game industry because the whole point of the products on display is to have fun. If you're going to a video game trade show thinking you're going to hunker down and do some serious work about serious products, then you are frankly in the wrong industry and at the wrong type of event.
The guy says he's been to two E3's and at his first he was barely old enough to get in. So he clearly hasn't been part of the industry for long, nor has he even been in the workforce for long. Once he gets a little older he'll realize that what he's arguing against is exactly what these events are for. Just because people are having fun (in whatever way they choose to) doesn't mean they're not buying or selling products at the same time. A lot of back-room deals get done at E3.
That said, is E3 as much fun as it's cracked up to be? In my experience, going once is enough. It's like that all-weekend party your friend throws where you get so drunk you can't make it to work for the next week and you swear you're done with partying for the rest of your life. That feeling wears off after a while and eventually you do it again and then you remember why you said you weren't going to after the last time. Then you don't do it anymore.
For most people I know who have gone (and for me too), once at E3 is enough, twice is too much. But it's a good experience to have, and it can and should be a lot of fun. It's just a little too much to do every year.
I still think E3 should just be open to the public, though (as I said in another post), rather than keeping up this pretense of it being only for industry types, when it obviously isn't. All the pretense does is piss off people who think they're more deserving than others of being there. Give journos one day for themselves with the publishers and manufacturers, and then open it up to the public.
Fine, I bet there are thousands of people willing to take their place.
You know what? You're being sarcastic, but let's look at this seriously for a minute.
The Tokyo Game Show is open to the public. And despite a couple of rough years, it is now drawing larger crowds than ever. It absolutely dwarfs E3 in both the number of visitors and the physical size of the show (I've been to both, several times). Obviously, in Japan it is considered far more important than E3, both from an industry standpoint and because 150,000 real consumers get to try out your games and it's a good bet that if they like them, they will buy them.
E3 seems like a wasted opportunity as it's set up now. So people get to read about games, big deal. That's not going to convince anybody to buy anything. Open the show up. Let everybody in.
TGS also does have a day that is only open to journalists. So it's not like they need to compete with the crowds. If you are a journalist, that day is actually pretty amazing, because there are only about 10,000 people in a space that's about the size of Central Park in Manhattan. And on that day you get to see all the games that aren't ready for primetime yet too, so it's not like you're missing anything you might otherwise see at a closed-off show.
E3 was created as an industry trade show - it was not intended as a journalistic event, so it shouldn't be thought of that way. But as it's grown into a show where games are presented to the public often for the first time, it seems like it'd be a good idea to get the public directly involved, and also to give journalists a day to themselves.
1) You need the best possible quality but have no access to a print shop which can deliver it. Reality is that most cheap print shops will not deliver accurate color even if you jump through all the hoops.
:)
True, and this lets me ask the question - what online print shops *do* allow you to actually use ICC color profiles? I'm sure there are some pro-oriented shops that do, I just don't know which ones. Are there any that are as easy to use/fast/cheap as Kodak (Ofoto), or Shutterfly?
I have used both Ofoto (wish they'd kept that name) and Shutterfly, and they're easy and quick but the prints are snapshot quality at best. Shutterfly always adds a yellow cast. Ofoto at least does not add a cast but the results are unpredictable.
2) You print material isn't supposed to be seen by anybody else. Print shops have access to the images and will usually check prints.
DEFINITELY true
It's a total mistake to assume that nobody's going to handle your prints at one of these photo printers. If nothing else, it's highly likely that somebody is going to physically pick up your stack of prints from the printer and stuff them in an envelope. It's pretty likely that your prints will be quickly checked to at least make sure there were no obvious errors (like only half a photo being printed). People *are* gonna see your prints, just like they did in the days of film processing at your local drug store.
Personally, I do a mix of both home and online printing, depending on the photo. I do get the best results when printing myself, although I am *sure* I do pay more. For example, I printed out some of my and my wife's wedding photos myself to give out to close friends and family, and then printed the same photos through Ofoto to give to others. The Ofoto prints were okay, but on my own prints I was able to get the colors, contrast and brightness to exactly match what I wanted. Of course, I had to do about 10 test runs before I managed that, and even once I got things set up right, about every other print had some sort of smudge or other imperfection. (Part of that's my printer, but part of it's almost just endemic to home inkjet printing.) So I have no doubt that given all the paper and ink I used, I probably paid at least a buck a print for my own prints, vs. 19 cents or whatever it was for the Ofoto prints. But I did end up with better quality from my prints.
But these people are the early adopters - tech-savy users with sufficient free cash.
Well, not only that, but this is a very western-centric way of thinking (and more specifically, US-centric). Why should people in Japan, for example, be forced to wait 6 months for a DVD release in their "region" and then pay $60 for it, when they can buy the US disc for 11 bucks from Amazon? Region-coding is one form of price-fixing.
The vast majority of DVD players sold around the world these days are region-free, including from major DVD Forum members like Panasonic, Sony and Toshiba (on other continents). It's really only the US that's still clinging to this concept, because the Hollywood studios want it and US consumers generally aren't affected too much by it (unless you are, like me, a fan of foreign films and music). But even here, I can walk down to my corner deli and buy a region-free player for $50. So really, the only people who put up with region controls right now are the people that want to.
Region controls are unnecessary, anti-consumer, and really basically useless anyway. It's the movie industry's attempt at keeping the global economy at bay. Well, they're finally just going to have to adjust. If they want to sell DVD's only to people in certain regions, they just have to make them appeal to people in those regions. (For example, I'd still likely buy US-produced discs for the most part because the menus will be in English and the price will be lower. The industry would probably have to adjust more in places like Japan, but that could only mean lower prices for consumers there - in any case, consumers win.)
If this is really true about HD-DVD, then I think it will be a *big* boost for the format worldwide. And it will tip the balance for those early adopters here too, as you rightly point out... and we're the ones that tell all our friends what to buy. I was pretty firmly in the Blu-Ray camp before, but I'll switch in a second if HD-DVD truly has no region locks.
Who says their target market is teenagers anyway??
The problem is those teenagers eventually grow into adults. It's the McDonalds' theory of marketing. You hook 'em when they're young, and they'll keep coming back and then bring their kids as they become adults. And the cycle begins again.
If the cycle is broken, that's the end of everything. You lose the kids as they grow into adults, and you never hook that next generation.
I'm not convinced there's any real shift going on, though; I think it's probably just the end of the console cycle. I will say that I personally think video games have lately gotten generally more boring and repetitive, with lots of cookie-cutter FPS's and RPG's along with the yearly sports games updates taking most of the top sales slots, and that it's possible that some larger demographic shift is happening, but I still think it's more likely that the excitement will come back once the new consoles are out.
I don't pretend to have a source on this, but I cannot think of a single English word that begins with a 'g' followed by a vowel that has a soft g (i.e. a 'j' sound) as opposed to a hard g (i.e. a 'guh' sound).
Gerund? Germany? Germanium? George? Geo? General? Gee? Generation?
Sure, it's mostly "ge" words, but what about Gibraltar? (As in "the rock of".) Gin? (As in the alcoholic beverage or the card game.) I mean these are just off the top of my head.
There's no rule in English that says a "g" followed by a vowel must be a hard "g". And people were saying "jiff" long before I ever heard anybody pronounce it with a hard "g". It's an acronym; acronyms do not need to take the exact same pronunciation as the words the individual letters stand for.
The original pronunciation was "jiff" and as far as I'm concerned that's still the correct pronunciation. I mean at some point, if everybody pronounces a word differently than you simply say the language has changed and move on. But enough people still use the original pronunciation that I still consider it correct - I mean if a certain percentage of people started pronouncing "gin" with a hard "g", I think the rest of the people are just gonna think they're a bunch of morons, right? Why is this different? To me, pronouncing "GIF" with a hard "g" labels you as a newbie - it tells me you first heard of the format after others had started using that pronunciation, and you've probably surrounded yourself with other newbies who use that same incorrect pronunciation.
"someone at the riaa needs to be clued"
I think you misspelled "clubbed".
Well, that was good for my morning laugh...
I hate to say it but I'm starting to miss Hilary Rosen!
Who's the new RIAA whipping boy/girl anyway? Why don't we have a name to attach to this idiocy anymore? I want a specific target for my ire!
Video game designers usually pay below market rate in other CS disciplines, because they have such a high number of people wanting to work in their industry. Especially for the entry level jobs.
I worked for a major publisher in New York for several years (you figure out which; there is only one) and I don't know anybody there who made less than $50,000 per year regardless of experience level. Now, I didn't know everybody at the company, and I didn't know everybody's salary even among my friends and acquaintances, but nobody there felt like salaries were the problem.
In fact, the impression I got from working there was that this particular publisher, at least, paid higher than average salaries (compared with other industries) specifically so that they'd be able to demand more of the workers in terms of hours worked. There was no such thing as a 40 hour work week. If anybody complained, the implicit (if not explicit) response from management would be "go try finding a company that'll pay you as much as we do for the work you do."
People who say this is about the money are really missing the point. This lawsuit was not about money, because salaries in the game industry are actually fairly high. This lawsuit was about time, and maybe more importantly, the respect of an employees' time when they're not supposed to be at work. I think most people would agree that there is a point at which almost no amount of money makes a job worth it anymore. If you're asked to work, say, 167 hours per week (that's every single hour of every week, minus an hour per week for sleep), but your employer will pay you $1 million per year, is that worth it? I would turn that down. Maybe I could do it for a week just to make a quick few thousand bucks, but after that I'd probably be almost literally dead.
So the goal of this lawsuit was really to force EA to acknowledge that employees have their own time too. And if EA wants a chunk of that time, they have to ask, and it's going to cost them. They're not just going to get it for free anymore. Maybe that will cause them to think twice about forcing what amounts to slave labor conditions on their work force in the first place.
And on another note, the US should not necessarily control the internet. It is used by many people around the world. Its not even like the US invented it, either...
Huh? You can't be serious. The US did invent the internet, and has always owned and controlled the root servers. ICANN was created to take direct government control out of the equation, but it is still overseen by the US government (I'm not sure which branch, but I think it's the commerce department).
I, frankly, think the EU and UN are acting like a couple of spoiled children. "wah wah wah, we want the internet! wah wah!" Sheesh. We designed it, we built it, we control it. End of story. If they want to use it, great, and they should be thankful to us, like they should be thankful to us for a great many things, for opening it up to everybody around the world. There was no requirement for us to do so, just like there is no requirement for us to turn over root server control now. If we choose to, that's our business. If we don't, that's our business too.
I'd like to see what happens if the UN passes a resolution "requiring" us to turn over server control. Let's see them enforce that. It'll be just another example of how far beyond the UN's original mandate that organization has gone, and how useless and impotent it has become as a result.
A grouping of game elements into substance and style is somewhat useful, but really couldn't anyone with a decent knowledge of game development have figured it out?
Well, apparently not, because I don't think Gamasutra quite got it.
A game's substance has nothing to do with how a bullet travels through the air. That kind of thinking is why we're all stuck with cookie-cutter FPS's, sports and racing games these days. People (including most developers) mistake genre conventions for substance. That's still part of a game's style.
The reason we're stuck in this rut of game development today is that developers think they can look at existing games, alter minute stylistic details like how a bullet travels through the air and call it a new game.
The substance of a game is much more fundamental than that, i.e. what is the player avatar (a character, a ball, a group of ants?), what is the goal of the game, what is the gameplay mechanic required to reach that goal. Many developers simply skip these fundamental questions and start out with a pre-made template based on existing genres - these developers are not creating substance at all, they are simply making a stylistic alteration to a set of existing conventions.
he would confirm only eight games as being available the same day and date as the Xbox 360: Project Gotham Racing 3, Kameo, Perfect Dark Zero, Madden NFL 06, NBA Live 06, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06, Need for Speed Most Wanted, and FIFA 06: Road to FIFA World Cup.
Let me be the first (or maybe not?) to say "meh!"
And to this Wolfenstein announcement, again "meh!" How many more first-person shooters do we really need? It's not as if anybody was clamoring for another Wolf sequel after the last one (which was basically a dud, even by cookie-cutter FPS standards).
So we've got a few sports games, a racing game or two, a couple FPS's and Kameo, which was announced like 5 years ago and has now made the switch from two different systems to the 360. Yawn! Double-yawn!
Not even an attempt at innovation here. Nothing that's any different from what's available right now, except for higher resolutions. I'll take Katamari Damacy over any one of these games. Heck, give me KD in high-def and I'll sign up so fast for an Xbox 360 it'll make your head spin. But not one of these announced titles has me excited in the slightest.
Remember back when every successive generation of consoles allowed for totally new types of gameplay that we'd never seen before? You couldn't even do a Super Mario or Sonic type game until the NES/SMS. You couldn't do first-person stuff until the SNES with its scaling capabilities (which the Genesis tried to emulate later, especially with the Sega CD add-on). You couldn't do 3D until the Saturn and PlayStation. It all started slowing down with the current generation, and now it seems like all we're getting are sequels and rehashes that play exactly the same as what came before even on brand new machines.
I'll probably eventually buy a 360 and a PS2 (and a Revolution) because that's just what I do, and also because I do want high-def. But jesus, it's like developers (including MS's in-house teams) aren't even trying anymore.
But netflix takes time. I sent my movies back yesterday, and I won't have my new ones until tomorrow. If you want the movie today (or don't want to subscribe to a service or sign a blockbuster rental agreement), the disposable disc is a good option.
Gotta explain that one to me.
First of all, how many DVD's can you watch in a day? Unless you don't work or go to school (in other words, you just sit on your ass all day), I can't see how you'd watch 3 movies in one day and then have nothing left to watch. I (like most people) am lucky if I get through 3 DVD's in a week! And I just send them back as I watch, so I always have one or two new DVD's on the pile.
Second, the point of Netflix isn't speed, it's convenience. Sometimes people mistake one for the other, but they are not the same thing. I can put a DVD into my mailbox and magically, through the wonders of the US Postal Service, another one appears there in the same spot 2 days later. I don't need to go one inch out of my way or spend one single minute downloading or otherwise dealing with my movies. The whole point is I don't have to go out and buy or rent anything. Otherwise I'd just go to Blockbuster in the first place, so a disposable disc isn't going to help me any.
I'll stick with netflix, but some people will be better served by this method.
"Some" people will be served by almost anything. But what is your definition of "some"? Is three people a "some"? Is that enough to sustain a business? What about 10,000? 50,000? 100,000?
It doesn't matter that there are "some" people out there that would like this. I think it's been proven time and time again that most people have decided that they don't, or wouldn't. There are not nearly enough people interested in this to make it viable.
That's not even taking into account the fact that rental stores have no incentive to carry these things because they cut out a major source of revenue (even BB's "no late fees" promotion really has late fees... you pay $25 or whatever for the movie if you keep it out too long, then a restocking fee if you finally return it), and force them to continuously buy new inventory. Retailers that deal in sales only have little incentive either because the margins are so low. Would you rather sell discs that carry a profit of $5 per unit or discs that carry a profit of 50 cents per disc? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out.
And of course, there's the incompatibility thing, which basically makes the whole format a non-starter to begin with.
This is at least the third time this has been tried and both previous attempts (that I know of) failed utterly and spectactularly.
(Any other attempts would also have been failures; I just don't know about them if they occurred.)
Even the Dreamcast 360 label seems a little silly now. The Dreamcast was another dead before it hit the shelves console, but I don't think Sega could have had more disasters with their Dreamcast pre-launch if they had tried.
I don't think we will ever see a console launch disaster of this magnitude ever again.
That's revisionist. There was nothing wrong with the Dreamcast launch. If you're talking about the internal competition and arguments that went on prior to launch, that's just par for the course. The good news in the DC's case was that the best product out of all those considered did make it to market. It had a modem, it had the better 3D chip, it had the better industrial design between the two designs Sega had.
The DC launched in the US with a bunch of great games (around 20 of them, as I recall), including stuff like Soul Calibur, Sonic Adventure, and NFL2K. It was a good launch, I'd have to say. You're looking back on it now through 20/20 hindsight and attaching a reason to the system's overall failure that nobody could have foreseen at the time.
But if you want parallels between the Dreamcast and Xbox 360, there's a big one: Peter Moore. The one big mistake Sega made with the Dreamcast was thinking being first meant something, and MS is making the same mistake with the Xbox 360. I don't doubt for a second that a lot of that is Peter Moore.
The MS launch run-up has been a lot more chaotic and unfocused than even the DC launch run-up. It's more similar to the Saturn launch, which will probably always be the worst console launch in the history of gaming. MS won't even come close, no matter how badly they botch the 360 - at least we know the launch date! But there are some definite parallels there too, including a rush to beat competitors, a lack of firm launch titles, some unimpressive run-up events light on specifics, etc.
Well, at least it can ONLY affect florida. -sigh- guess i won't be buying games in florida on vacation anymore.
I guess I won't be going on vacation in Florida anymore. It's apparently ok in Florida to shoot people for any reason you like, but it's gonna be jail time if you sell the wrong video games?
Not to sound prejudiced against 1/50 of my fellow countrymen or anything, but this is not a state that should exist on this Earth. Can we at least dig a moat or something to symbolically separate ourselves from these people?
Well not everyone realizes that the XBox bombed in Japan. All they see is it's relative success in the US and then wonder why Microsoft is taking a loss. I dunno if they would have been in the black by now if the XBox was a success over seas, but I am sure they hoped and expected it to do better than it did.
I don't really have any doubt that they would have been closer to their forecasts (and to predictions of a $2 billion loss rather than a $4 billion loss) if they'd done better in Japan. They seem to be pretty close to their sales forecasts for the US and Europe, but it is really hard to understate how badly they've done in Japan. They are not even considered a major player there - people talk about them there in the same way we talk about the Tiger Telematics Gizmondo here. I mean, what are you gonna buy, a PSP, a DS, or a Gizmondo? That's how the Japanese feel about the Xbox, and the sales pretty much show that. The system's basically a joke there. It's got less than 1% market share.
I think MS learned some things from this as they're at least paying lip service to the country now and promising to refocus. They put on a big, somewhat pushy show at TGS that I personally think was a bit too "in your face" for the Japanese (even forcing Xbox bags on people right as they got off the train in Makuhari), but that sort of illustrates their continuing problems there. I think they understand that Japan is tough and they understand that they need to do better there, but I don't think they really have any clue whatsoever how to go about doing that. It's amazing to me that such a large multi-national corporation could be so out of touch with such a major market. I mean, just head-hunt some of Apple's guys, or something - there are plenty of American corporations that do well over there. It just requires an understanding of Japanese tastes, which it still seems like MS doesn't have.
I seem to recall a news article back in the day that said that Microsoft was going to risk five billion dollars on it's entry into the marketplace, but I can't find it anymore.
Not sure what you were reading, but the figure I saw repeatedly was "as much as" $2 billion, such as in this article here.
$2 billion was already a chunk of change. Now it's double that, and they never did get into the black. Clearly something is not right at that division, and it really does make you wonder about the financial prospects of the Xbox 360. (Note that that's different from marketplace prospects; obviously, MS could keep this money-losing charade up basically forever, though at some point you'd think investors would expect some real returns.)
No doubt they learned some things from their Xbox experience, but we'll see if any of that actually translates to profits. Which is all that really matters in business, in the end.
There was also some cop game on the Genesis that came with a revolver-styled lightgun, which was very good as well... but I can't think of its name.
Lethal Enforcers. Didn't sell all that well.
HotD2 on DC didn't sell all that well either. In fact gun games haven't sold all that well for a lot of years. It's a niche genre at this point. (Note that this is not a qualitative judgment; I love gun games, and own many of them.)
btw, I gotta take at least a little bit of an issue with the headline here - the GunCon is a specific brand of light gun made by Namco. The reason why people like it is that it hooks directly into your TV signal, unlike most light guns that simply read what's on your TV screen. This makes the GunCon series (really just two models) extremely accurate compared to other light guns.
So when I read the headline about new "GunCon concepts" for the Revolution, I was excited at what Namco had cooking, especially given that it implied at the same time that they were working on gun games for the Revolution. No such luck, obviously; this is simply an article with renders of generic light guns that aren't from anybody in particular.
It'd be nice if somebody could fix the headline. The way it's worded now is really no different than talking about a new Dual Shock controller for the Xbox, or a new Wavebird for the PS3, when you're really just talking about generic controllers.
Seems to me the main problem is the number of problems. You have the input method problem, the screen size problem, the compatable periferal problem, the external storage problem and the performance problems.
None of which apparently affect Japan, where mobile phones are the primary method of accessing the internet and personal data.
It's really difficult to understate how much more advanced the Japanese mobile phone industry is than that of any other country (and especially the United States). The problem for the rest of the world that's trying to catch up is that the mobile phone culture has grown in Japan around the idea of the phone as a central hub, whereas it's the opposite in other countries. Learning to use a mobile phone as hub for those of us in the US is like learning a second language. It's not intuitive for us like it is for them.
But if you want to look at some of the solutions they've come up with for the problems you've listed, they're easily apparent for all to see. The input issue is something that's both better and worse in Japan... typing on a computer keyboard is hardly all that fast to begin with there (you need to type the hiragana, then select kanji combinations from long lists for every word), so mobile phones are not really much different. Screen sizes there are simply bigger than they are here, as is screen quality. 3.2" QVGA screens are pretty much standard. Phones sell based on speed and interface so that's not an issue either (phones with poor interfaces - such as those from Motorola and Nokia - simply don't sell). And external storage is handled in the same way it's handled here - offsite or on a separate PC.
People do use computers in Japan. But for most people, mobile phones handle 90% of everything they could want to do with a PC. Email, web browsing (via high-speed networks), game playing, etc. There are a huge number of mobile-oriented web sites in Japan - in fact, you really can't design a site in Japan without having a mobile version these days that duplicates all of the functions and most of the look and feel of the real thing. And I'm not just talking single HTML pages, I'm talking about sites that offer real web services via mobile. So there's no dearth of content. Many phones also have TV tuners, almost all phones have java, and most phones have 3D graphics capabilities.
One other thing, which I think is both interesting and important: their cell phones often do more than most "smart" phones in the US, yet they both cost less than US market cell phones and they are not PDA-based. Their smart-phones grew from the cell phone form factor, whereas ours have grown from the PDA. So we pay more and our phones are less stylish - and style is a huge deal in Japan. (I also think it's a bigger deal here than manufacturers seem to think, and it's one reason why smart-phones here don't sell as well as they could. Put smart-phone type capabilities in a RAZR-like package with a QVGA screen and a 3 megapixel camera and sell it for $300-$400 and you'll sell a crazy number of units. That's what the Japanese industry does.)
It's still debateable whether it works better to have one big laptop that does 100% of what you want, or whether it's better to have a PC at home to act as a storage and sync device and then to have a bunch of smaller devices (phone, iPod, Game Boy or PSP) to do everything else. In Japan, it's kind of important to have a very small device that you can use on the train to do things like check email and browse the web. You really can't use a laptop, nor do most people want to lug one around. And as an extension of that, over time the carriers and phone manufacturers have added other entertainment-related functions to help people get through those down times.
I don't know that the culture is ever going to change here, and I don't know that it should either. There are fewer things people really need to use cell phones for here - the train situation, where you've got about one square foot of standing space
Microsoft didn't praise the controller. One guy who happens to work at Microsoft praised the controller.
One guy acting as Microsoft's representative "praised" the controller. It's not stupid to suggest "Microsoft" praised the controller. Peter Moore is Microsoft in this context. He is the VP in charge of Xbox marketing, and he was speaking on company time.
Now, I put "praised" in quotes because it's obvious that this was pretty backhanded (it's not "debateable", as Zonk said it was, it's completely obvious what he meant). This is not the kind of praise I'd want if somebody said something similar about me. (As in, "that's a nice attempt at building a bookshelf" or "that's a nice attempt at a good haircut.") But the distinction you're trying to make between "one guy" and the company of Microsoft is meaningless.
While there are some games that are artistic, maybe if we saw some topselling games that didn't feature easter eggs that were sex scenes with hookers, rewards for stealing cars, or woman that look at all realistic, instead of Lara Croft with her need for a cantilevered bra, people might start taking games seriously.
Bingo! I had ctrl-c'd the exact same sentence you had all ready to make pretty much the same reply you did. So allow me to just expand upon it a little bit further.
In my experience, when most people talk about "artistic merit" where it applies to games, it's in the context of "government action", as in the case of this post. The government has only even talked about acting in the cases of M-rated games, most of which are *at best* artistically questionable. (Note that I'm not saying that's *because* they're M-rated, but it is true in my experience that unlike the film industry with its R rating, most M-rated games are M-rated because M-rated content sells better, not because the "art" required it.)
In other words, whoever makes this argument is barking up the wrong tree. If you want to talk about the artistic merits of a game like Katamari Damacy or Rez, that's great. But these are not the kinds of games anybody is talking about regulating. So it's a little disingenuous to suggest that it's hard for anybody to accept the "artistic merit" of games based on games that have no artistic merit.
Now, it's a little different thing to argue that you just shouldn't be regulating anything, because artistic merit is subjective at best. But this is the real world, not fantasy land. If the game industry wants people to recognize games as art, then they should start treating their own products that way. As it is, for the most part games are simply commodities, designed to sell as many copies as possible. If developers could fix upon one magic formula that would guarantee sales of 10 million units every time, they would use it every time, regardless of how artistic that formula was, or how artistic re-using that formula over and over was. (Does this sound familiar to anyone? This is the ideal game publishers have been working towards for about the last 10 or 15 years.)
Art is speech and speech should not be regulated. Commodity products, however, are a different story - in fact, commodity products can be and are regulated, in every industry. And when those commodity products contain almost nothing but prurient content designed for no other reason than to attract the attention (and dollars) of immature males, then it's really hard to argue that they should be protected from anything.
Art is art. Games are not art, with a few exceptions. If the industry wants games to be considered art, then they should make them that way. The fact is, right now at least, they don't.
AAC is not a bad format, in fact it is significantly better than MP3 from a quality at bitrate perspective.
Not according to this test. There is a slight difference, but not enough to be noticeable in most cases, and nothing just a few more kbps wouldn't cure.
That test (which I took part in) pretty much convinced me to just stick with mp3 using the latest LAME. All this junk about mp3 being "obsolete" is just marketing hooey - it sounds better than WMA at the same bit rate, it sounds about the same as AAC at the same bit rate, and the only codecs that are significantly better are MPC and Vorbis, and good luck finding a portable player that supports either of those. Again though, nothing a few extra kbps in an mp3 encode couldn't overcome. (It should also be noted that both MPC and Vorbis sound better than AAC too.)
mp3 is still the best codec to use because while technically proprietary, it's basically universal. Even Sony, which was the lone real holdout, is now on board with mp3. Given that it's really no worse than AAC and is actually better than WMA, I really don't see why you'd want to use either alternative given that they both only work with a subset of portable players. If I decide to sell my iPod and buy a Sony player one day (not likely, but you never know), all my music will still work fine and I will not have to re-rip (or re-purchase!) any of it.
btw, I actually gave up about halfway through that listening test because on many of the songs I couldn't tell the difference between *any* of the codecs. (Results were accepted on a per-song basis, so you didn't need to submit results for everything to be counted.) I felt like I probably was usually able to pick out the ATRAC track because there was always one that was noticeably worse than the others, but otherwise all of the tracks of a given song sounded pretty much the same to me. And I'm a pretty critical listener.
That test convinced me that there are just a whole lot of myths about audio codecs floating around out there.
...to proprietary media formats.
I'm using the term "proprietary" loosely, of course... but buy into any media format that's tied to one specific device, and it's a given that someday you're going to have a stack of media that you can't play and a much lighter bank account to go with it.
Spirited Away requires some understanding of bath houses and kami to fully enjoy.
Yeah, I was kind of surprised that someone else described that as the most western-friendly. To me, it's the one film that requires the most understanding of Japanese culture in general (not just bath houses and kami) to enjoy. You can still enjoy it without that understanding, but you won't really fully "get" it.
All of Miyazaki's films have an underlying theme or moral. I have yet to find an American who really understood what Spirited Away was saying on the first viewing... and I must admit the only reason I probably did was that I watched it first in Japan surrounded by Japanese speakers. (So I both had it explained to me - I didn't understand all the dialogue - and I got to hear the impressions of a lot of other people in the theater afterwards.) Most people in the west seem to describe it as a run-of-the-mill "coming of age" fantasy, which it most certainly is not.
So I wouldn't start with that one. I think it's actually kind of an advanced Miyazaki film - there's a lot of subtext, a lot of cultural specificity, and while the underlying theme is relatively simple (it's a film about gluttony and greed), it seems like the way it's presented is not all that easy for westerners to grasp.
Same is actually true of Nausicaa, which has a lot of Cold War stuff mixed in and that kind of gets lost in translation, and maybe even forgotten now that the cold war is over...
I do agree that Mononoke is a good place to start. It's pretty simple, but it doesn't seem simple as you're watching it. It's beautifully animated, it's still relevant, and the plot itself is pretty imaginative, though easy to follow. It's also not really culturally-specific - I mean there are a few things (like the little guys running around the forest, I can't even remember what they're called), but nothing that gets in the way of following the story or understanding the theme. And you can imagine a similar sort of plot set in the west at that time.
Kiki and Porco Rosso are good too, although they're a bit lighter and may give newcomers a bit of a skewed idea of what Miyazaki's really all about. Laputa I just didn't think held up all that well the last time I saw it; the animation is not his best, and the story doesn't flow as well as some of his later films.
Totoro might be the one of his films (well, other than Howl's Moving Castle) that I haven't seen, so I can't comment on it.
Re the vice-versa, it's interesting to speculate if and when Miyazaki will do something in CGI.
Miyazaki has been using CGI since at least Mononoke Hime, if not before. He just doesn't go overboard with it, and he uses it in a way such that it's not noticeable unless you're specifically looking for it.
Again, something I think Hollywood could learn from. Even in live-action films, CGI effects have taken on a life of their own. It used to be that special effects were used to make something look real that otherwise couldn't be done. Nowadays, CGI effects are used for the sake of the effect - there's not even any intent to make something look real, the intent is instead to draw attention to the effect.
In animation, the idea has always been to make something beautiful but to use the animation to tell a story. The visuals are subservient; the better they look, the better for the film, but the whole reason the visuals exist is to help tell a story. Once the visuals start distracting from that story, and people start paying attention more to the look of a film than the story it's telling, then the film is a failure. Miyazaki is one of the few remaining animation directors that seem to understand that animation is no different than live action in this regard - that film, including animation, is a medium for telling stories. It is not a CGI showcase. (Hollywood seems to have forgotten this fact in live-action films lately too.)
This is the way I feel about at least some of Pixar's films. I saw Toy Story and I just didn't get it. The comedy was way over-broad in that bad TV sitcom sort of way, and it seemed to me that the only real unique thing about the film was its all-CGI visuals. Most of the reviews I saw at the time spent a lot of time talking about the visuals and very little talking about the story, except for the comedy, which I just didn't even think was very funny.
(There are Pixar films I think are pretty good - I liked Finding Nemo, for example - but in general they just spend way too much time worrying about the technical aspects of their films and not nearly enough on telling a good story.)
But there have been CGI scenes in at least the last several of Miyazaki's films, when he's wanted to do something that couldn't be done by traditional hand-drawn techniques. He just doesn't believe in doing things for the sake of doing it, he believes in doing what needs to be done to tell the story he wants to tell. Miyazaki's films are great because he first of treats them as films and not simply as "anime" (or "animation", which is all that word means in Japan), and second of all because he understands what filmmaking is really all about.
A good place to start would be many of it's filters and effects. Some of those filters are available for Photoshop as well, but require some hunting and some extra capital.
What filters and effects specifically? Adobe only includes the ones that are actually necessary, and a subset of "creative" filters that people seem to still use even though they shouldn't. These are mainly leftovers from as long as 10 years ago.
A lot of people would be happy if Adobe would dump most of their stock filters altogether. People rely on these way too much. There are only a few that are actually useful and leaving the other ones in there only encourages people to be lazy and/or to try to be more "creative" than they actually are.
Gimp has features that make it comparable to Illustrator in some respects, as opposed to just Photoshop comparisons.
Now, if Adobe combined Photoshop and Illustrator...
This makes no sense whatsoever. Photoshop is a raster editor, Illustrator is a vector editor. The Gimp does vector illustrations? That's news to me (it may be the case these days, it's just news to me if it is).
There is no real logical way to combine raster and vector editors; they require two totally different sets of tools.
Maybe you meant Photoshop and ImageReady? That would make more sense, and I agree that these two should be combined.
The Gimp is never going to get anywhere against Photoshop though, good UI or not, until it supports 16 bit images. It is utterly useless for a lot of people without that. I don't mean it's not as good as Photoshop, I mean if you have 16 bit images, it's useless. Basically rules it out right there for professional use.