The RIAA says that P2P encourages illegal downloads? Holy crap! When did this happen?
You know, I don't even expect readers here to RTFA anymore. But is it too much to ask for you to read the freakin' summary?
C&D's were handed out to actual P2P companies. That is the news (and yes, it is news, and has been reported many other places). It's not just that the RIAA doesn't like P2P generally. It is a specific act against P2P services.
I'd pay $100 for a revamped version of FFVII, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Yep, me too, provided it was like one of those crazy Japanese SE's. I'd pay $50 for a regular version, easy. And I never pay that for games anymore.
If someone doesn't like FF7, that's great for you. What the hell do you want from the rest of us? Save your money and stay home, who cares? A lot of people do want an FF7 remake and have been hoping to hell Square would make one ever since they started teasing us about it around 5 years ago. This has been something they've been talking about ever since the launch of the PS2.
My prediction is they're already working on it, and now they're really just teasing us. I think it'll happen, though; I think Sony wants it to happen and will finance it if necessary. It will sell PS3's just like the original sold PS1's.
But if you don't understand the appeal, I mean whatever. Good for you, I guess. There's a reason it's news whenever this is talked about, though. People do care.
It would seem to be in Microsoft's best interests to get any many S-E games as possible to come out for the 360.
It would have been in their best interests last time around too, but it didn't happen.
Don't assume all this stuff happens in a vacuum. Sony is actively trying to thwart all of MS's moves in Japan and they have the advantage of playing on their home turf - they know the guys as S-E, they work with them all the time, they literally speak the same language. They also run their businesses the same way - the Japanese way. They understand each other, and know they can work together... especially if a bit of extra cash for an "exclusive" is thrown around.
MS was not able to get the offline FF series on the original Xbox and I doubt they will get it on the Xbox 360. This is still Square's bread and butter (as far as FF goes) and Sony knows it's what sells systems. I also doubt you'll see a Dragon Quest on Xbox 360 either - which is arguably even more important in Japan, where DQ outsells FF.
Square-Enix may throw MS a bone every once in a while, but it will likely be old games like FFXI that have run out their exclusivity deals, and crap like Drakengard that nobody really cares about anyway. All so MS can count S-E as a development partner and use it in their marketing.
Pay full price for a cellphone and they come unlocked.
Walk into a Cingular store (or whatever carrier) and buy a phone. Unless you are signing up for a new contract (or renewing one), you will pay full price. And you will get a locked phone.
Carriers only subsidize phones when they need to do so for customer acquisition or customer retention. But they will be all too happy to sell you a full-priced phone at any other time - and one that's just as locked as any subsidized phone.
This is just a publicity stunt. They're doing it solely so they can look good and say that they've done something the politicians will like. There's no way they can actually enforce this.
They can and will enforce it. Do you know why? Because the ESRB is comprised of the game publishers. This is the fact that people sometimes seem to forget. It is not an agency outside the industry. It is the industry, literally. The ESRB was created because the industry wanted to self-police and avoid government intervention; the alternative to the ESRB is not nothing, it's a government agency like the FCC overseeing video games. Which would you rather have to deal with?
The ESRB can and does routinely hand out fines to member companies. From what I remember from my time in the industry, fines start at $10,000 and go up from there. Most of these fines are not publicized because they're for procedural things like answering ESRB requests later than promised. There's no question of whether or not the fines will be paid; the fines will be paid or the publisher loses membership in the ESRB. No membership, no ratings; no ratings, no sales at stores like Wal-Mart, Gamestop or EB.
Regardless, this is nothing different than what the ESRB's stated policy has always been. They're just reiterating it because obviously a few publishers didn't quite get it. Publishers are required to submit the most prurient content for review. There's no qualifier saying "the most prurient playable content". Whether it's supposed to be playable or not doesn't matter. The ESRB has been saying this all along through the whole Hot Coffee thing; it's not as if they don't know about easter eggs or hidden content. It's not as if the publishers can pull a fast one on their own industry group. The rules have always been pretty clear.
I guess what I'm saying is sheesh people, everybody calm down. This is what you want to have happen; the industry policing itself, and enforcing its own rules. This is the way you keep people like Hillary Clinton from writing laws saying the ESRB is ineffective and therefore the government needs to step in and assume its role.
Which will work for a while, but eventually (1-2 years) phones will have 4-8GB of flash, wireless transfer, and a 'good enough' UI. And then it is bye-bye for the lowend music player market.
Except when you've been playing music for 10 hours straight at work and you suddenly realize the battery that you just charged that morning is dead and you can no longer make that call to your wife, or your kids, or your boss, or whatever.
This is the achilles heel of the phone and it will always be that way. This is why phones will never usurp the dedicated music player market and I don't care what anybody else says about it. Nobody wants to go back to the days when we had to charge our phones twice a day - nobody. Nobody wants to charge their music players twice a day either.
When you add in the UI hassles that are impossible to overcome (one of the big reasons why the iPod is so popular is because of the wheel) and the added cost of building all these extra functions in, you've got your stereotypical jack of all trades, master of none.
I can't even think of an electronic device - any electronic device, ever - that has taken the existing functions of two devices, merged them into one, and performed those functions so well that the new device actually killed off the original existing devices. I mean cell phones tell time too but people still wear wrist watches and put alarm clocks on their nightstands. Just because a device can do a thing doesn't mean it can do it well or that people want it to do that thing.
Convergence is, and always has been, overrated. The trend is, and always has been, towards more categories of electronic devices, not fewer. The world is about divergence, not convergence.
It really is strange to me how so many people say they won't buy DRM-protected products, but happily bought HL2.
Group "A" says they won't buy anything with DRM.
Group "B" bought HL2 and says they have no problem with Steam.
Don't lump Group "A" and Group "B" together and act as if they're all the same people. More than likely, they aren't.
Obviously, most of the people in this thread are here because they're interested in what Valve is up to - these are Group "B" people. The fact that so many in here are saying how much they disliked Steam is what's surprising. A full survey of the entire site would likely be that much more biased against it.
I didn't buy HL2 because of Steam. I know the game sold pretty well regardless but they didn't get my $50. I'm no hypocrite when it comes to DRM and I'm sure there are plenty of other people on this site who are the same as me. I'm a Group "A" person, which is probably not surprisingly a rare thing in a thread specifically dedicated to a company that has embraced DRM.
I will say that I buy DRM products if I know I can easily crack the DRM. HL2 was cracked a long time ago but by then I didn't figure it was worth bothering - the game wasn't supposed to be all that great anyway, from what I'd heard. But I do have copy-protected CD's (ha!), CSS-laden DVD's (ha!), and other DRM-encrusted pieces of media in my house, all of which is a joke to get around.
But anything that's difficult or impossible, I just won't buy. And I've stuck to that.
Quite strange actually. Is our society becoming a communist one, where no one actually owns anything, but a few gigantic corporations decide what you can do with what and for how long? A very weird, twisted form of communism indeed... What do you guys think?
Well, weird and twisted because it's more fascist than communist (they're at opposite ends of the political spectrum). Under communism, theoretically speaking everybody owns an equal share of everything. Of course, it never worked out that way, but there was never this huge deference to copyright holders like there is now in this country because the whole idea of one entity controlling the copyright of something is sort of against the entire theory behind communism to begin with.
So I wouldn't say this has got anything to do with communism, which seems to have these days become a catch-all term for any sort of totalitarianism. But this is about as anti-communist as you can get - it's the idea that nobody can own anything, vs. the communist ideal that everybody can own everything.
It was interesting to see in that blog that what I've heard elsewhere is confirmed: Police are doing much of the looting.
Ok, let's be clear about this, because both your and the blog's statements are pretty inflammatory and not accurate.
In a declared emergency, the police are allowed and in fact in some cases even required to commandeer what they see fit to maintain order and public safety. That does include guns and food. This is not "looting". The store owners are all reimbursed by the city and state later.
This happens all the time, but the one instance I can remember that was pretty heavily publicized was during that bank robbery and shootout in Los Angeles a while back, where the police were so outgunned that they went to a gun store during the gunfight and picked it clean. This is part of their duty; they have the authority and responsibility to commandeer items required to do their job during a public emergency.
It's really no different than a firefighter breaking somebody's door down during a fire. I mean, are they breaking and entering? Do you have them arrested for tresspassing? Obviously not - they're doing what they need to do to get the job done, and they're legally allowed to do it.
I think it's actually pretty tasteless for this guy to write something like "who knows what their real motives are?"... I mean, these are the guys out there in the direct line of fire trying to protect and feed a whole lot of innocent people who haven't eaten or drunk anything in 3 or 4 days. They're getting shot at (and hit) by street thugs for no reason, and they're doing their best to restore order in a clear vacuum of leadership and without nearly enough manpower.
The most important people in a game publisher or development house are the games testers because their input is most relevant to shaping the product as it will apear to the users
Huh? So the people that actually come up with the ideas, design the characters, the levels, the worlds, design the gameplay elements; then the people that program all that in, create the artwork, create the physical look and feel of the game, these people are less important than the testers? WTF? Without all those other people that handle the creative and production tasks before the testers, there would be no game!
This is like saying the test audiences for a Hollywood film are the most important part of the filmmaking process. It makes no sense. They're more important than the writers, directors, cinematographers, editors, etc.? They most definitely are not!
But this leads me to:
And, of course - creator control of intellectual property, because creators deserve to own their own work.
Who the hell is a "creator" of a game these days? Every game these days has many producers, directors, program managers, writers, coders, illustrators, 3D modelers, level designers, character designers, and other creative and management team members that all provide input in how the game will end up. These people work for both developers and publishers.
Is this a bloated system? Sometimes. But there are a lot of people out there who like games like Final Fantasy and Grand Theft Auto and those games are not going to make themselves. A lot of people are involved. Take a look at the credits for even a simple game like Katamari Damacy sometime - it's huge.
Creators do have control of their games, because these creators are collectively called "companies". All companies are are groups of like-minded people working on related projects (even if they're only related in that they're all for the same company). The company is the creator. Why should one person get to keep control of a game if he leaves the company, and nobody else who worked on it at that company gets jack? Is that somehow more fair than the system we have now?
es, and we all know that multi-disc games are doomed to failure, and that the developer and producer will fail as well, like what happened with Final Fantasy VII, VIII, IX; Arc the Lad Collection; Legend of Dragoon; Gran Turismo 2; Star Ocean Till the End of Time; I could go on but you get the point.
All of those with the exception of FF7 came out very late in the PS1's lifespan. The PS1 was also designed at a time when there was no other choice for what optical format to use. If you wanted to go optical, it was CD or nothing. (The competition was also similarly limited, so that if a game took up more than one disc on the PS1, it took up more than one disc on the Saturn too, and likely couldn't even be done on the N64 or Jaguar.)
The Xbox 360 designers could have easily gone with a higher-capacity format. They chose not to, even knowing that the competition was going to do otherwise. If developers are talking about games coming out at launch or soon after using two or more discs, what does that say about the system two or three years down the road? It says to me that either a large number of games are going to require disc swapping on the Xbox 360 when they won't on other systems, or that textures are going to end up being so low-resolution on the Xbox 360 (in order to fit the game on one or two discs) that games look significantly worse than they do on other systems.
Some games can't even realistically use more than one disc because of their persistent world. Look at a game like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. This is a game that uses 4.7GB as it is, and only then because the PS2 doesn't stream from dual-layer discs all that well (the Xbox version is ported from the PS2, although the texture quality is in some cases bumped up a bit). I can guarantee you the designers at Rockstar would love to have as much storage space for textures as they could get. They would use it all. They'd have to use fewer repeating textures, and the textures they used could be higher-resolution. The more space, the better.
A game like GTA:SA is going to have more polygons on the Xbox 360 and it's going to run smoother, but it's not going to look a hell of a lot better overall than it does on the original Xbox. It will look significantly better on the PS3, because there will be about five times more texture storage space available.
This is the big, big weak link of the Xbox 360, if you ask me. MS can talk all they want about how close the two systems are in polygon performance or whatever, but the fact is in any large game with a persistent world you are just not going to have anywhere close to photo-realistic textures, and you are going to have a lot of noticeably repeating textures. Certain types of games won't suffer that much, but any 3D game where the idea is to create a believable world for you to explore are going to have major problems. It's a big bottleneck.
It's similar to having a massively fast 3.6ghz processor and then giving it only 64K of RAM to work with. I mean, it doesn't even matter how fast the system is, you just can't do anything with that power in that case. The DVD drive in the Xbox 360 isn't quite that limiting, but when you're talking about 1920x1080 HD resolutions and trying to texture convincing worlds, DVD's just do not provide for enough storage space. It's a real Achilles' heel.
he FTC classify "Switch and Bait" as refusing to sell you something that is available in the Ad. What the stores can do is have only 1 xbox360 core, and have it purposely sold out.
They can legally then say they ran out of supplies and sucker you into paying for the expensive bundle.
No, they can't. A store has to have a "reasonable quantity" of stock on hand for any advertised product. Reasonable quantity is defined as a quantity expected to meet demand.
You cannot have 1 unit of something on hand, advertise that, sell out of it and then switch customers to a higher priced unit. That is bait and switch, as defined by law. The loophole you described does not exist.
What a store can do is be honest about it in advance. If they want to have a limited quantity of something available and advertise it, they can say "LIMITED QUANTITY AVAILABLE!" Stores do this all the time. But that doesn't excuse a store from the "reasonable" quantity requirement, i.e. "limited" does not mean "one unit". It just means they will probably have less stock than they would normally need. Yes, this is somewhat subjective and arbitrary, but a lot of law is based on common sense. If you're going to advertise something and you have only one unit in stock, it is pretty obvious what you're trying to do.
Stores in New York have been busted for this sort of thing many times - I'm sure it's happened elsewhere as well, but I obviously mainly hear about it in my local area.
Seriously, of course it does not make any sense for the retailer. It is the gamers' right!
And why is that? Why do you have the right to act like a complete idiot and buy crap that you have not put any research into, then stiff the retailer for the cost and hassle of shipping it back to the publisher when you start suffering buyer's remorse? How is that your right?
One phrase comes to mind: Caveat emptor - let the buyer beware. With a few exceptions that are specifically spelled out in various state statutes, this is the guiding principle behind retail law in this country. As it says in Wikipedia, "In most jurisdictions there is no legal requirement for the vendor to provide a refund or exchange." Caveat emptor.
And also, retailers do not have to eat the returns. They can simply pass them over to designers.
And how do you propose they arrange that? Simply ship em off and invoice them? Good luck ever getting that publisher to send your store games ever again. Caveat emptor applies just as much to retailers as it does to end-users - in this case, the stores are buying wholesale from the publishers. The publishers are under no legal requirement to accept returns simply because customers didn't like their game.
I have no patience for consumers who do no research before buying products, whether we're talking about a refrigerator or a DVD player or a TV or a car or house or a video game. Educate yourself, try a demo if you can, and if you simply can't find any worthwhile info on a game before buying it, then let that enter into your buying decision. But it is ultimately your decision on whether or not to buy a game, and you should live with the consequences.
(Note that I am not talking about games that are buggy or otherwise defective, I am simply talking about games that you play and decide you do not like.)
Can you buy a 20 GB portable USB2 or Firewire HD for $100?
You can buy a 60GB 2.5" drive for $90 and then buy a USB2.0 enclosure for $10, thereby netting you not a 20GB portable drive for $100, but a 60GB portable drive for $100.
This stuff is not expensive. It doesn't help when people use unnecessary hyperbole and fail to recognize the difference between 2.5" and 3.5" drives, but the fact remains that MS is overcharging. I mean let's face it, they want to make a profit this time. But clearly, if others can make a profit selling higher-capacity drives for the same price, why can't MS with all their buying power?
(Answer: because they're subsidizing the R&D costs for the system with accessory prices. Everyone does this, but MS is doing it to a greater degree than any other console manufacturer I can recall.)
The lasers use mirrors. The mirrors in the laser have to be able to withstand the energy of the laser. Therefore there IS a mirror that can reflect the laser without absorbing enough of it to do damage.
Well, no, because the biggest problem with every laser is heat. In fact, the reason lasers powerful enough to do any amount of destruction couldn't be this small before is because of the cooling systems required.
This new system combines various new technologies and then uses a pulse beam (yes, like Star Wars!) to keep it from overheating. This is one of those things that makes it more like what you see in sci-fi that nobody ever thought was realistic, but it turns out it was perfectly realistic for reasons nobody considered before. (I should qualify that by saying it still won't look like Star Wars because the laser is still travelling at the speed of light, but it is a pulse beam weapon.)
But any laser powerful enough to kill will blow itself apart if not shut off after a certain amount of time. Even this one, even with its pulse beam. And that's using components and mirrors specifically tuned to the laser's wavelength.
I'd agree with you except for the fact that UMD movies are selling amazingly well.
They're not selling "amazingly well" - the top ones have sold around 100,000 copies worldwide. That's 1/10 what a popular game sells and about 1/100 what a popular DVD sells. Granted, it's with a fairly small installed base of systems, but I'd call that number "decent", not "amazing".
Even "decent" is pretty surprising, though.
As for failing miserably in general, I really don't think that's the case. As a new entrant into the market they have snapped up a pretty decent share of the market in both Japan and the US.
Yeah, but they have spent a TON more on marketing and R&D than Nintendo has, and the system itself costs them more to make. How long are they going to keep this up?
I mean there's really no secret to selling stuff. Put out a good product and price it right and people will buy it. That doesn't mean you'll make money on it, though. I could sell a plasma HDTV for ten bucks and I'm sure I'd sell millions of them and take a nice chunk of market share from the likes of Panasonic and Sony. But I'd be in the poorhouse when all was said and done, so would it be worth it?
All of Nintendo's competitors had mildly successful launches that were similar (in their times) to the PSP launch. But it was all downhill from there, and that's the same thing that's happening now. US hardware numbers are hard to find but we do know that in Japan, the DS is gaining steam while the PSP is fading. (Every week, the gap in hardware sales gets wider - at this point, the DS outsells the PSP by about 2:1.) With the release of Nintendogs here, I would expect a similar gap would open in the US. Sony's own published sales numbers worldwide have not been all that impressive in comparison with Nintendo's.
And that's with Sony trying really hard. Once they decide they don't have the stomach for this anymore - which everyone else has eventually, and Sony will too with the financials they've got at the moment - things will probably just get worse. I mean, Nintendo's practically on cruise control with the DS and they're already winning.
Sony could have done something with the PS3 to promote sales of the PSP, but they didn't. Stick a UMD drive in there, make the system compatible, heck, make it a UMD writer. No such luck, and that's an ace Sony had up their sleeve that they didn't take advantage of.
I wouldn't write off the PSP completely. Things can always turn around. But the parallels to past Game Boy competitors just can't be ignored at this point.
Consumers aren't going to bite on this. There's a limit to what people will accept. Forced bundles worked for the PS2 but that's really the only time they've worked, and everybody knows now that if you just wait 5 minutes there will be plenty of bare systems around to buy if that's what you want.
I have no doubt - none - that you'll be able to walk into a store on launch day, plunk down $300 or $400, and walk out with nothing but an Xbox 360 box if that's all you want. That's the way it was on PSP and DS launch day, and MS is saying they'll have a million Xbox 360's on sale at that system's launch. Save your money - don't preorder. Don't be a sucker. Show these idiots that forced bundles don't work anymore.
America is at a cross-roads of sorts. It can choose to be the The Christian Republic of America or the United States of America.
Oh blah blah blah. People say this every generation, because they don't realize people have said it every generation. America is always at some kind of crossroads. And you know what? It usually comes out pretty okay.
The political pendulum swings back and forth. Always has. But this country has never been particularly liberal, except maybe for a brief period in the late 1960's and early 1970's that was mainly a reaction to the Vietnam War (and the same thing may happen again in a few years). People talk about how even Democrats today are basically conservatives - well, who the hell do you think dropped the atom bomb on Japan? It wasn't a Republican.
The point being, this is a conservative country. Get used to it. It's always been that way, going back to its founding - remember, this country exists because people needed somewhere to go to practice their religion. The freedom to not practice religion was added later.
This is not to say I share this view - on most issues (not all), I'm about as liberal as it gets in this country. But I've been around long enough to see several swings of the pendulum, to live through several wars, and to know that nothing that's going on right now is really all that unusual in the grand scheme of things. Sure, if you take a 10 year view, things aren't so hot right now for us liberals and scientific thinkers. Maybe even with a 50 year view we'd be at or near a low point. But those of us who lived through Vietnam (and I was young, but I do remember it) and the aftermath know how bad things can really get in terms of ideology, the economy, and yes, even science. This that we're in now, this is nothing. A blip on the radar.
So, before you come up with these dramatic proclamations about how America's at a "crossroads" and you predict we'll take the wrong path and eventually fade into irrelevance, remember all the times people before you said those exact same things, and remember how dumb they sounded even five years later.
America is simply doing what it always does, going through the motions of trying to find a balance of values that appeals to its people. Those values may not be your values, but they're really no different than ever. It's a balance that can never truly be attained, though, so you will see things shift back and forth periodically. We are just at the extreme edge of one of those shifts right now, but from a historical viewpoint I really don't see that this is anything unusual.
It really does sound like emulation with a different box...
It's not emulation, it's what people in the know call a "famiclone". In fact, there are probably dozens of similar systems out on the market - if you look up famicom systems on Ebay (or NES systems) 99% of the results will be this thing or similar models, not real Nintendo systems.
The Famicom was reverse-engineered years ago. Nintendo hates it but there's nothing they can do about it. These sorts of consoles have been on the market for probably a decade now. Interestingly enough, the vast majority of those plug and play TV game systems (like the Intellivision 25 in 1, the Atari 10 in 1 and Activision 10 in 1, etc.) are built using a "famicom on a chip" - same basic idea. They're using the famicom to emulate whatever system they're supposed to be.
Nintendo does go after "pirate" consoles every once in a while, but these are systems with Nintendo software pre-installed on them. They always carefully word their press releases so that it looks like the console itself is illegal, though, and the media usually plays along. It's a scare tactic.
Frankly, I don't see why 1up thinks this model is so special, unless this is just the first they've heard that such things exist. That doesn't really make it newsworthy, though.
(Sometimes news isn't really about how new something is but about letting people know about something they probably don't already know about... but the fact is famiclones have been on the market for a long time and are neither going away nor are they headed for the mainstream.)
One question...why bother getting scans of the brochure, when they could just refer to Microsoft's official press release that stated all of these facts last week?
I love it - last week we had people saying "why is this news? We all knew about this months ago!" and now we have people saying "why is this news? MS just released this info last week!"
Ok, I guess since all of you guys know the future two to three years in advance, the whole rest of the web may as well just close up shop. You could open up a nice business in fortune-telling if your predictions are so freakin' accurate.
Did you bother reading the brochure? MS said nothing last week, for example, about pricing on memory units, separate hard drives, faceplates, etc. This is the first confirmation we have that the hard drive will be required for backward compatibility. It's the first mention of what cables come with each system (important, because component cables are a $40 accessory, and only the $400 system comes with them). It's the first mention that the $400 system is in fact cosmetically different - it has "premium chrome" accents, whereas the $300 system is just white. (To me, the cheap system looks better, honestly. Painting a piece of plastic with chrome paint doesn't look classy to me, it looks tacky.)
If you knew all these facts last week, why didn't you speak up and tell us all about them?
Some of us also just find these brochures interesting and in some cases amusing, especially for the language they use. I like how, according to MS, having the "best experience" with the Xbox 360 requires the possession of "multiple faceplates." You'll only have a "good experience" otherwise - you've been warned!
A further study, released some time ago, suggests that there are "Lies, damn lies, and statistics."
Well, in this case, I'd say the study released today is closer to the truth than the study that it supposedly "contradicts", because this study is a study of studies. It's a look at the preponderence of evidence in all studies done up to this point.
It would be analogous to saying violent crime is down 10% this year, although this is "contradicted" by the fact that there was a murder just down the street last night. Well, no, there's nothing contradictory about that. That murder goes into the set of statistics that are then compared with the same set of statistics from last year. One does not contradict the other, because one is the whole truth and the other is just a part of the data.
The study that's being talked about today went back and examined the findings of all the studies done up to that point, and found that the vast majority of them indicated that violent games lead to an increase in aggression. They did note that "a few" said the opposite. The point is the prevailing view provided by all the research that's been done is that violent games do lead to increased aggression, irrespective of a few individual studies that came to different conclusions.
I know what people here want to believe, but at some point you have to look at it and say "well, 85 or 90% of all studies say one thing - doesn't that probably indicate that something's there?" I mean it seems like a stretch to suggest that all of the studies that indicate increased aggression were somehow flawed while all of those on the other side were not. There are probably flaws on both sides, but if you toss out the flawed studies the total result would likely be exactly the same.
No, this is not about reducing spam in the comments on blogs. This is about reducing the number of blogs whose authors post only spam.
Sheesh, I know it's de rigeur here to not read the article, but at least read the freakin' summary.
Now Google Blogger is introducing Word Verification for user comments to prevent comment spam
What part of that don't you understand?
And I say it's about time too. I have a (very unpopular, sporadically updated) blog on Blogger/Blogspot - linked above - and every single time I post an update I get at least 3 or 4 nearly instantenous spam comments. I have to check the next day and go through and delete them manually as it is now.
Of course, the really annoying thing is these are the only comments I ever get! But I guess that's to be expected with a blog that's updated approximately once every three months...
The game involves real money and looting, this should be expected and the players know the risk coming into the game. No crime, IMHO, was committed.
It's a good thing then, that YMHO, in this case, doesn't matter.
The fact is countries, states, and towns have laws. It is up to those countries, states and towns to set their own laws, and it is up to their people to follow them and their legal system to enforce them. It doesn't matter how a game is designed; if the law says one thing, and a game is designed in such a way that it allows people to break that law, they will have to answer for their crimes.
I mean look, you could design a game such that it allows one person to electrically shock another person with such a jolt that it carries a 1% chance of killing them. Basically sort of an online version of homicidal Russian Roulette. That's the way the game is designed, everybody knows it going in - does that make it legal for someone to pull that virtual trigger? No.
That's just using an example where applicable laws are already on the books, but any government is free to come up with new ones specifically related to games. Obviously in some countries (like, supposedly, the US), free speech laws might come into play so you can't really restrict the design of the game too much, but you can restrict the actions of users against other users. I mean, nobody has a constitutional right to harm someone else, be that in the real world or the virtual world. In a country like Japan, the government has even more authority to regulate these things.
Given the choice between guilt-tripping about feeding the American Mega-Corp monster your heard-earned yen, and providing needed greenbacks to your local silicon-pimp zaibatsu, the average Japanese will, simply, buy Japanese.
Tell that to all the iPod-owning, Windows-using, Levi's-wearing, Mariah Carey-buying, Starbucks-drinking, Gucci-coveting, McDonald's-eating Japanese people that partake in western products every hour of every day.
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The RIAA says that P2P encourages illegal downloads? Holy crap! When did this happen?
You know, I don't even expect readers here to RTFA anymore. But is it too much to ask for you to read the freakin' summary?
C&D's were handed out to actual P2P companies. That is the news (and yes, it is news, and has been reported many other places). It's not just that the RIAA doesn't like P2P generally. It is a specific act against P2P services.
I'd pay $100 for a revamped version of FFVII, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Yep, me too, provided it was like one of those crazy Japanese SE's. I'd pay $50 for a regular version, easy. And I never pay that for games anymore.
If someone doesn't like FF7, that's great for you. What the hell do you want from the rest of us? Save your money and stay home, who cares? A lot of people do want an FF7 remake and have been hoping to hell Square would make one ever since they started teasing us about it around 5 years ago. This has been something they've been talking about ever since the launch of the PS2.
My prediction is they're already working on it, and now they're really just teasing us. I think it'll happen, though; I think Sony wants it to happen and will finance it if necessary. It will sell PS3's just like the original sold PS1's.
But if you don't understand the appeal, I mean whatever. Good for you, I guess. There's a reason it's news whenever this is talked about, though. People do care.
It would seem to be in Microsoft's best interests to get any many S-E games as possible to come out for the 360.
It would have been in their best interests last time around too, but it didn't happen.
Don't assume all this stuff happens in a vacuum. Sony is actively trying to thwart all of MS's moves in Japan and they have the advantage of playing on their home turf - they know the guys as S-E, they work with them all the time, they literally speak the same language. They also run their businesses the same way - the Japanese way. They understand each other, and know they can work together... especially if a bit of extra cash for an "exclusive" is thrown around.
MS was not able to get the offline FF series on the original Xbox and I doubt they will get it on the Xbox 360. This is still Square's bread and butter (as far as FF goes) and Sony knows it's what sells systems. I also doubt you'll see a Dragon Quest on Xbox 360 either - which is arguably even more important in Japan, where DQ outsells FF.
Square-Enix may throw MS a bone every once in a while, but it will likely be old games like FFXI that have run out their exclusivity deals, and crap like Drakengard that nobody really cares about anyway. All so MS can count S-E as a development partner and use it in their marketing.
Pay full price for a cellphone and they come unlocked.
Walk into a Cingular store (or whatever carrier) and buy a phone. Unless you are signing up for a new contract (or renewing one), you will pay full price. And you will get a locked phone.
Carriers only subsidize phones when they need to do so for customer acquisition or customer retention. But they will be all too happy to sell you a full-priced phone at any other time - and one that's just as locked as any subsidized phone.
This is just a publicity stunt. They're doing it solely so they can look good and say that they've done something the politicians will like. There's no way they can actually enforce this.
They can and will enforce it. Do you know why? Because the ESRB is comprised of the game publishers. This is the fact that people sometimes seem to forget. It is not an agency outside the industry. It is the industry, literally. The ESRB was created because the industry wanted to self-police and avoid government intervention; the alternative to the ESRB is not nothing, it's a government agency like the FCC overseeing video games. Which would you rather have to deal with?
The ESRB can and does routinely hand out fines to member companies. From what I remember from my time in the industry, fines start at $10,000 and go up from there. Most of these fines are not publicized because they're for procedural things like answering ESRB requests later than promised. There's no question of whether or not the fines will be paid; the fines will be paid or the publisher loses membership in the ESRB. No membership, no ratings; no ratings, no sales at stores like Wal-Mart, Gamestop or EB.
Regardless, this is nothing different than what the ESRB's stated policy has always been. They're just reiterating it because obviously a few publishers didn't quite get it. Publishers are required to submit the most prurient content for review. There's no qualifier saying "the most prurient playable content". Whether it's supposed to be playable or not doesn't matter. The ESRB has been saying this all along through the whole Hot Coffee thing; it's not as if they don't know about easter eggs or hidden content. It's not as if the publishers can pull a fast one on their own industry group. The rules have always been pretty clear.
I guess what I'm saying is sheesh people, everybody calm down. This is what you want to have happen; the industry policing itself, and enforcing its own rules. This is the way you keep people like Hillary Clinton from writing laws saying the ESRB is ineffective and therefore the government needs to step in and assume its role.
Which will work for a while, but eventually (1-2 years) phones will have 4-8GB of flash, wireless transfer, and a 'good enough' UI. And then it is bye-bye for the lowend music player market.
Except when you've been playing music for 10 hours straight at work and you suddenly realize the battery that you just charged that morning is dead and you can no longer make that call to your wife, or your kids, or your boss, or whatever.
This is the achilles heel of the phone and it will always be that way. This is why phones will never usurp the dedicated music player market and I don't care what anybody else says about it. Nobody wants to go back to the days when we had to charge our phones twice a day - nobody. Nobody wants to charge their music players twice a day either.
When you add in the UI hassles that are impossible to overcome (one of the big reasons why the iPod is so popular is because of the wheel) and the added cost of building all these extra functions in, you've got your stereotypical jack of all trades, master of none.
I can't even think of an electronic device - any electronic device, ever - that has taken the existing functions of two devices, merged them into one, and performed those functions so well that the new device actually killed off the original existing devices. I mean cell phones tell time too but people still wear wrist watches and put alarm clocks on their nightstands. Just because a device can do a thing doesn't mean it can do it well or that people want it to do that thing.
Convergence is, and always has been, overrated. The trend is, and always has been, towards more categories of electronic devices, not fewer. The world is about divergence, not convergence.
It really is strange to me how so many people say they won't buy DRM-protected products, but happily bought HL2.
Group "A" says they won't buy anything with DRM.
Group "B" bought HL2 and says they have no problem with Steam.
Don't lump Group "A" and Group "B" together and act as if they're all the same people. More than likely, they aren't.
Obviously, most of the people in this thread are here because they're interested in what Valve is up to - these are Group "B" people. The fact that so many in here are saying how much they disliked Steam is what's surprising. A full survey of the entire site would likely be that much more biased against it.
I didn't buy HL2 because of Steam. I know the game sold pretty well regardless but they didn't get my $50. I'm no hypocrite when it comes to DRM and I'm sure there are plenty of other people on this site who are the same as me. I'm a Group "A" person, which is probably not surprisingly a rare thing in a thread specifically dedicated to a company that has embraced DRM.
I will say that I buy DRM products if I know I can easily crack the DRM. HL2 was cracked a long time ago but by then I didn't figure it was worth bothering - the game wasn't supposed to be all that great anyway, from what I'd heard. But I do have copy-protected CD's (ha!), CSS-laden DVD's (ha!), and other DRM-encrusted pieces of media in my house, all of which is a joke to get around.
But anything that's difficult or impossible, I just won't buy. And I've stuck to that.
Quite strange actually. Is our society becoming a communist one, where no one actually owns anything, but a few gigantic corporations decide what you can do with what and for how long? A very weird, twisted form of communism indeed... What do you guys think?
Well, weird and twisted because it's more fascist than communist (they're at opposite ends of the political spectrum). Under communism, theoretically speaking everybody owns an equal share of everything. Of course, it never worked out that way, but there was never this huge deference to copyright holders like there is now in this country because the whole idea of one entity controlling the copyright of something is sort of against the entire theory behind communism to begin with.
So I wouldn't say this has got anything to do with communism, which seems to have these days become a catch-all term for any sort of totalitarianism. But this is about as anti-communist as you can get - it's the idea that nobody can own anything, vs. the communist ideal that everybody can own everything.
It was interesting to see in that blog that what I've heard elsewhere is confirmed: Police are doing much of the looting.
Ok, let's be clear about this, because both your and the blog's statements are pretty inflammatory and not accurate.
In a declared emergency, the police are allowed and in fact in some cases even required to commandeer what they see fit to maintain order and public safety. That does include guns and food. This is not "looting". The store owners are all reimbursed by the city and state later.
This happens all the time, but the one instance I can remember that was pretty heavily publicized was during that bank robbery and shootout in Los Angeles a while back, where the police were so outgunned that they went to a gun store during the gunfight and picked it clean. This is part of their duty; they have the authority and responsibility to commandeer items required to do their job during a public emergency.
It's really no different than a firefighter breaking somebody's door down during a fire. I mean, are they breaking and entering? Do you have them arrested for tresspassing? Obviously not - they're doing what they need to do to get the job done, and they're legally allowed to do it.
I think it's actually pretty tasteless for this guy to write something like "who knows what their real motives are?"... I mean, these are the guys out there in the direct line of fire trying to protect and feed a whole lot of innocent people who haven't eaten or drunk anything in 3 or 4 days. They're getting shot at (and hit) by street thugs for no reason, and they're doing their best to restore order in a clear vacuum of leadership and without nearly enough manpower.
The most important people in a game publisher or development house are the games testers because their input is most relevant to shaping the product as it will apear to the users
Huh? So the people that actually come up with the ideas, design the characters, the levels, the worlds, design the gameplay elements; then the people that program all that in, create the artwork, create the physical look and feel of the game, these people are less important than the testers? WTF? Without all those other people that handle the creative and production tasks before the testers, there would be no game!
This is like saying the test audiences for a Hollywood film are the most important part of the filmmaking process. It makes no sense. They're more important than the writers, directors, cinematographers, editors, etc.? They most definitely are not!
But this leads me to:
And, of course - creator control of intellectual property, because creators deserve to own their own work.
Who the hell is a "creator" of a game these days? Every game these days has many producers, directors, program managers, writers, coders, illustrators, 3D modelers, level designers, character designers, and other creative and management team members that all provide input in how the game will end up. These people work for both developers and publishers.
Is this a bloated system? Sometimes. But there are a lot of people out there who like games like Final Fantasy and Grand Theft Auto and those games are not going to make themselves. A lot of people are involved. Take a look at the credits for even a simple game like Katamari Damacy sometime - it's huge.
Creators do have control of their games, because these creators are collectively called "companies". All companies are are groups of like-minded people working on related projects (even if they're only related in that they're all for the same company). The company is the creator. Why should one person get to keep control of a game if he leaves the company, and nobody else who worked on it at that company gets jack? Is that somehow more fair than the system we have now?
es, and we all know that multi-disc games are doomed to failure, and that the developer and producer will fail as well, like what happened with Final Fantasy VII, VIII, IX; Arc the Lad Collection; Legend of Dragoon; Gran Turismo 2; Star Ocean Till the End of Time; I could go on but you get the point.
All of those with the exception of FF7 came out very late in the PS1's lifespan. The PS1 was also designed at a time when there was no other choice for what optical format to use. If you wanted to go optical, it was CD or nothing. (The competition was also similarly limited, so that if a game took up more than one disc on the PS1, it took up more than one disc on the Saturn too, and likely couldn't even be done on the N64 or Jaguar.)
The Xbox 360 designers could have easily gone with a higher-capacity format. They chose not to, even knowing that the competition was going to do otherwise. If developers are talking about games coming out at launch or soon after using two or more discs, what does that say about the system two or three years down the road? It says to me that either a large number of games are going to require disc swapping on the Xbox 360 when they won't on other systems, or that textures are going to end up being so low-resolution on the Xbox 360 (in order to fit the game on one or two discs) that games look significantly worse than they do on other systems.
Some games can't even realistically use more than one disc because of their persistent world. Look at a game like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. This is a game that uses 4.7GB as it is, and only then because the PS2 doesn't stream from dual-layer discs all that well (the Xbox version is ported from the PS2, although the texture quality is in some cases bumped up a bit). I can guarantee you the designers at Rockstar would love to have as much storage space for textures as they could get. They would use it all. They'd have to use fewer repeating textures, and the textures they used could be higher-resolution. The more space, the better.
A game like GTA:SA is going to have more polygons on the Xbox 360 and it's going to run smoother, but it's not going to look a hell of a lot better overall than it does on the original Xbox. It will look significantly better on the PS3, because there will be about five times more texture storage space available.
This is the big, big weak link of the Xbox 360, if you ask me. MS can talk all they want about how close the two systems are in polygon performance or whatever, but the fact is in any large game with a persistent world you are just not going to have anywhere close to photo-realistic textures, and you are going to have a lot of noticeably repeating textures. Certain types of games won't suffer that much, but any 3D game where the idea is to create a believable world for you to explore are going to have major problems. It's a big bottleneck.
It's similar to having a massively fast 3.6ghz processor and then giving it only 64K of RAM to work with. I mean, it doesn't even matter how fast the system is, you just can't do anything with that power in that case. The DVD drive in the Xbox 360 isn't quite that limiting, but when you're talking about 1920x1080 HD resolutions and trying to texture convincing worlds, DVD's just do not provide for enough storage space. It's a real Achilles' heel.
he FTC classify "Switch and Bait" as refusing to sell you something that is available in the Ad. What the stores can do is have only 1 xbox360 core, and have it purposely sold out.
They can legally then say they ran out of supplies and sucker you into paying for the expensive bundle.
No, they can't. A store has to have a "reasonable quantity" of stock on hand for any advertised product. Reasonable quantity is defined as a quantity expected to meet demand.
You cannot have 1 unit of something on hand, advertise that, sell out of it and then switch customers to a higher priced unit. That is bait and switch, as defined by law. The loophole you described does not exist.
What a store can do is be honest about it in advance. If they want to have a limited quantity of something available and advertise it, they can say "LIMITED QUANTITY AVAILABLE!" Stores do this all the time. But that doesn't excuse a store from the "reasonable" quantity requirement, i.e. "limited" does not mean "one unit". It just means they will probably have less stock than they would normally need. Yes, this is somewhat subjective and arbitrary, but a lot of law is based on common sense. If you're going to advertise something and you have only one unit in stock, it is pretty obvious what you're trying to do.
Stores in New York have been busted for this sort of thing many times - I'm sure it's happened elsewhere as well, but I obviously mainly hear about it in my local area.
Seriously, of course it does not make any sense for the retailer. It is the gamers' right!
And why is that? Why do you have the right to act like a complete idiot and buy crap that you have not put any research into, then stiff the retailer for the cost and hassle of shipping it back to the publisher when you start suffering buyer's remorse? How is that your right?
One phrase comes to mind: Caveat emptor - let the buyer beware. With a few exceptions that are specifically spelled out in various state statutes, this is the guiding principle behind retail law in this country. As it says in Wikipedia, "In most jurisdictions there is no legal requirement for the vendor to provide a refund or exchange." Caveat emptor.
And also, retailers do not have to eat the returns. They can simply pass them over to designers.
And how do you propose they arrange that? Simply ship em off and invoice them? Good luck ever getting that publisher to send your store games ever again. Caveat emptor applies just as much to retailers as it does to end-users - in this case, the stores are buying wholesale from the publishers. The publishers are under no legal requirement to accept returns simply because customers didn't like their game.
I have no patience for consumers who do no research before buying products, whether we're talking about a refrigerator or a DVD player or a TV or a car or house or a video game. Educate yourself, try a demo if you can, and if you simply can't find any worthwhile info on a game before buying it, then let that enter into your buying decision. But it is ultimately your decision on whether or not to buy a game, and you should live with the consequences.
(Note that I am not talking about games that are buggy or otherwise defective, I am simply talking about games that you play and decide you do not like.)
In other words, a few horse heads will show up in some beds, some vague threats made, and they'll get off with no punishment.
(As Captain Oveur:) "Joey, have you ever been to a Turkish prison?"
Can you buy a 20 GB portable USB2 or Firewire HD for $100?
You can buy a 60GB 2.5" drive for $90 and then buy a USB2.0 enclosure for $10, thereby netting you not a 20GB portable drive for $100, but a 60GB portable drive for $100.
This stuff is not expensive. It doesn't help when people use unnecessary hyperbole and fail to recognize the difference between 2.5" and 3.5" drives, but the fact remains that MS is overcharging. I mean let's face it, they want to make a profit this time. But clearly, if others can make a profit selling higher-capacity drives for the same price, why can't MS with all their buying power?
(Answer: because they're subsidizing the R&D costs for the system with accessory prices. Everyone does this, but MS is doing it to a greater degree than any other console manufacturer I can recall.)
The lasers use mirrors. The mirrors in the laser have to be able to withstand the energy of the laser. Therefore there IS a mirror that can reflect the laser without absorbing enough of it to do damage.
Well, no, because the biggest problem with every laser is heat. In fact, the reason lasers powerful enough to do any amount of destruction couldn't be this small before is because of the cooling systems required.
This new system combines various new technologies and then uses a pulse beam (yes, like Star Wars!) to keep it from overheating. This is one of those things that makes it more like what you see in sci-fi that nobody ever thought was realistic, but it turns out it was perfectly realistic for reasons nobody considered before. (I should qualify that by saying it still won't look like Star Wars because the laser is still travelling at the speed of light, but it is a pulse beam weapon.)
But any laser powerful enough to kill will blow itself apart if not shut off after a certain amount of time. Even this one, even with its pulse beam. And that's using components and mirrors specifically tuned to the laser's wavelength.
I'd agree with you except for the fact that UMD movies are selling amazingly well.
They're not selling "amazingly well" - the top ones have sold around 100,000 copies worldwide. That's 1/10 what a popular game sells and about 1/100 what a popular DVD sells. Granted, it's with a fairly small installed base of systems, but I'd call that number "decent", not "amazing".
Even "decent" is pretty surprising, though.
As for failing miserably in general, I really don't think that's the case. As a new entrant into the market they have snapped up a pretty decent share of the market in both Japan and the US.
Yeah, but they have spent a TON more on marketing and R&D than Nintendo has, and the system itself costs them more to make. How long are they going to keep this up?
I mean there's really no secret to selling stuff. Put out a good product and price it right and people will buy it. That doesn't mean you'll make money on it, though. I could sell a plasma HDTV for ten bucks and I'm sure I'd sell millions of them and take a nice chunk of market share from the likes of Panasonic and Sony. But I'd be in the poorhouse when all was said and done, so would it be worth it?
All of Nintendo's competitors had mildly successful launches that were similar (in their times) to the PSP launch. But it was all downhill from there, and that's the same thing that's happening now. US hardware numbers are hard to find but we do know that in Japan, the DS is gaining steam while the PSP is fading. (Every week, the gap in hardware sales gets wider - at this point, the DS outsells the PSP by about 2:1.) With the release of Nintendogs here, I would expect a similar gap would open in the US. Sony's own published sales numbers worldwide have not been all that impressive in comparison with Nintendo's.
And that's with Sony trying really hard. Once they decide they don't have the stomach for this anymore - which everyone else has eventually, and Sony will too with the financials they've got at the moment - things will probably just get worse. I mean, Nintendo's practically on cruise control with the DS and they're already winning.
Sony could have done something with the PS3 to promote sales of the PSP, but they didn't. Stick a UMD drive in there, make the system compatible, heck, make it a UMD writer. No such luck, and that's an ace Sony had up their sleeve that they didn't take advantage of.
I wouldn't write off the PSP completely. Things can always turn around. But the parallels to past Game Boy competitors just can't be ignored at this point.
...for the PSP, didn't it?
Consumers aren't going to bite on this. There's a limit to what people will accept. Forced bundles worked for the PS2 but that's really the only time they've worked, and everybody knows now that if you just wait 5 minutes there will be plenty of bare systems around to buy if that's what you want.
I have no doubt - none - that you'll be able to walk into a store on launch day, plunk down $300 or $400, and walk out with nothing but an Xbox 360 box if that's all you want. That's the way it was on PSP and DS launch day, and MS is saying they'll have a million Xbox 360's on sale at that system's launch. Save your money - don't preorder. Don't be a sucker. Show these idiots that forced bundles don't work anymore.
America is at a cross-roads of sorts. It can choose to be the The Christian Republic of America or the United States of America.
Oh blah blah blah. People say this every generation, because they don't realize people have said it every generation. America is always at some kind of crossroads. And you know what? It usually comes out pretty okay.
The political pendulum swings back and forth. Always has. But this country has never been particularly liberal, except maybe for a brief period in the late 1960's and early 1970's that was mainly a reaction to the Vietnam War (and the same thing may happen again in a few years). People talk about how even Democrats today are basically conservatives - well, who the hell do you think dropped the atom bomb on Japan? It wasn't a Republican.
The point being, this is a conservative country. Get used to it. It's always been that way, going back to its founding - remember, this country exists because people needed somewhere to go to practice their religion. The freedom to not practice religion was added later.
This is not to say I share this view - on most issues (not all), I'm about as liberal as it gets in this country. But I've been around long enough to see several swings of the pendulum, to live through several wars, and to know that nothing that's going on right now is really all that unusual in the grand scheme of things. Sure, if you take a 10 year view, things aren't so hot right now for us liberals and scientific thinkers. Maybe even with a 50 year view we'd be at or near a low point. But those of us who lived through Vietnam (and I was young, but I do remember it) and the aftermath know how bad things can really get in terms of ideology, the economy, and yes, even science. This that we're in now, this is nothing. A blip on the radar.
So, before you come up with these dramatic proclamations about how America's at a "crossroads" and you predict we'll take the wrong path and eventually fade into irrelevance, remember all the times people before you said those exact same things, and remember how dumb they sounded even five years later.
America is simply doing what it always does, going through the motions of trying to find a balance of values that appeals to its people. Those values may not be your values, but they're really no different than ever. It's a balance that can never truly be attained, though, so you will see things shift back and forth periodically. We are just at the extreme edge of one of those shifts right now, but from a historical viewpoint I really don't see that this is anything unusual.
It really does sound like emulation with a different box...
It's not emulation, it's what people in the know call a "famiclone". In fact, there are probably dozens of similar systems out on the market - if you look up famicom systems on Ebay (or NES systems) 99% of the results will be this thing or similar models, not real Nintendo systems.
The Famicom was reverse-engineered years ago. Nintendo hates it but there's nothing they can do about it. These sorts of consoles have been on the market for probably a decade now. Interestingly enough, the vast majority of those plug and play TV game systems (like the Intellivision 25 in 1, the Atari 10 in 1 and Activision 10 in 1, etc.) are built using a "famicom on a chip" - same basic idea. They're using the famicom to emulate whatever system they're supposed to be.
Nintendo does go after "pirate" consoles every once in a while, but these are systems with Nintendo software pre-installed on them. They always carefully word their press releases so that it looks like the console itself is illegal, though, and the media usually plays along. It's a scare tactic.
Frankly, I don't see why 1up thinks this model is so special, unless this is just the first they've heard that such things exist. That doesn't really make it newsworthy, though.
(Sometimes news isn't really about how new something is but about letting people know about something they probably don't already know about... but the fact is famiclones have been on the market for a long time and are neither going away nor are they headed for the mainstream.)
One question...why bother getting scans of the brochure, when they could just refer to Microsoft's official press release that stated all of these facts last week?
I love it - last week we had people saying "why is this news? We all knew about this months ago!" and now we have people saying "why is this news? MS just released this info last week!"
Ok, I guess since all of you guys know the future two to three years in advance, the whole rest of the web may as well just close up shop. You could open up a nice business in fortune-telling if your predictions are so freakin' accurate.
Did you bother reading the brochure? MS said nothing last week, for example, about pricing on memory units, separate hard drives, faceplates, etc. This is the first confirmation we have that the hard drive will be required for backward compatibility. It's the first mention of what cables come with each system (important, because component cables are a $40 accessory, and only the $400 system comes with them). It's the first mention that the $400 system is in fact cosmetically different - it has "premium chrome" accents, whereas the $300 system is just white. (To me, the cheap system looks better, honestly. Painting a piece of plastic with chrome paint doesn't look classy to me, it looks tacky.)
If you knew all these facts last week, why didn't you speak up and tell us all about them?
Some of us also just find these brochures interesting and in some cases amusing, especially for the language they use. I like how, according to MS, having the "best experience" with the Xbox 360 requires the possession of "multiple faceplates." You'll only have a "good experience" otherwise - you've been warned!
A further study, released some time ago, suggests that there are "Lies, damn lies, and statistics."
Well, in this case, I'd say the study released today is closer to the truth than the study that it supposedly "contradicts", because this study is a study of studies. It's a look at the preponderence of evidence in all studies done up to this point.
It would be analogous to saying violent crime is down 10% this year, although this is "contradicted" by the fact that there was a murder just down the street last night. Well, no, there's nothing contradictory about that. That murder goes into the set of statistics that are then compared with the same set of statistics from last year. One does not contradict the other, because one is the whole truth and the other is just a part of the data.
The study that's being talked about today went back and examined the findings of all the studies done up to that point, and found that the vast majority of them indicated that violent games lead to an increase in aggression. They did note that "a few" said the opposite. The point is the prevailing view provided by all the research that's been done is that violent games do lead to increased aggression, irrespective of a few individual studies that came to different conclusions.
I know what people here want to believe, but at some point you have to look at it and say "well, 85 or 90% of all studies say one thing - doesn't that probably indicate that something's there?" I mean it seems like a stretch to suggest that all of the studies that indicate increased aggression were somehow flawed while all of those on the other side were not. There are probably flaws on both sides, but if you toss out the flawed studies the total result would likely be exactly the same.
No, this is not about reducing spam in the comments on blogs. This is about reducing the number of blogs whose authors post only spam.
Sheesh, I know it's de rigeur here to not read the article, but at least read the freakin' summary.
Now Google Blogger is introducing Word Verification for user comments to prevent comment spam
What part of that don't you understand?
And I say it's about time too. I have a (very unpopular, sporadically updated) blog on Blogger/Blogspot - linked above - and every single time I post an update I get at least 3 or 4 nearly instantenous spam comments. I have to check the next day and go through and delete them manually as it is now.
Of course, the really annoying thing is these are the only comments I ever get! But I guess that's to be expected with a blog that's updated approximately once every three months...
The game involves real money and looting, this should be expected and the players know the risk coming into the game. No crime, IMHO, was committed.
It's a good thing then, that YMHO, in this case, doesn't matter.
The fact is countries, states, and towns have laws. It is up to those countries, states and towns to set their own laws, and it is up to their people to follow them and their legal system to enforce them. It doesn't matter how a game is designed; if the law says one thing, and a game is designed in such a way that it allows people to break that law, they will have to answer for their crimes.
I mean look, you could design a game such that it allows one person to electrically shock another person with such a jolt that it carries a 1% chance of killing them. Basically sort of an online version of homicidal Russian Roulette. That's the way the game is designed, everybody knows it going in - does that make it legal for someone to pull that virtual trigger? No.
That's just using an example where applicable laws are already on the books, but any government is free to come up with new ones specifically related to games. Obviously in some countries (like, supposedly, the US), free speech laws might come into play so you can't really restrict the design of the game too much, but you can restrict the actions of users against other users. I mean, nobody has a constitutional right to harm someone else, be that in the real world or the virtual world. In a country like Japan, the government has even more authority to regulate these things.
Given the choice between guilt-tripping about feeding the American Mega-Corp monster your heard-earned yen, and providing needed greenbacks to your local silicon-pimp zaibatsu, the average Japanese will, simply, buy Japanese.
Tell that to all the iPod-owning, Windows-using, Levi's-wearing, Mariah Carey-buying, Starbucks-drinking, Gucci-coveting, McDonald's-eating Japanese people that partake in western products every hour of every day.