The game's soundtrack has one a track which has to be among those most annoying, yet strangely attractive songs, ever; I am obviously referring to Birthday Cake,
Birthday Cake by Cibo Matto is not on the Jet Grind Radio soundtrack. It's on the Jet Set Radio Future soundtrack. These are two different games with two different soundtracks. It's a matter of taste which you like better, but most people put the original soundtrack up there with the best ever... JSRF's soundtrack is usually not spoken of with quite the same reverence.
btw, here is Wikipedia's page on Cibo Matto. I actually saw them live before they even put an album out at a Lush concert in NYC (where they were based). They were an interesting band... really just two girls with a Casio keyboard at the time I saw them. Their ideas really came out more in the studio.
I've not played the Dreamcast game, but Jet Set Radio Future is one of my favorite games. A perfect marriage of style and substance.
If you liked JSRF, you'll love JSR/(JGR). A lot of people, myself included, thought JSRF tipped the balance a bit too far to the "style" side of the substance/style equation, and it really was a fundamentally different game. In the original game, for example, you actually had to do a series of stick movements to "write" your graffiti, and the harder the tag, the more complex your stick movements had to be. Obviously this meant that if you were being chased, you really had to be quick and precise with your control.
Sega removed this completely from JSRF, which is a lot more of a straight platformer with a distinctive visual style. (This isn't the only major change, but it's one example of the type of changes Sega made to JSRF.) JSR was really all about tagging and outwitting the cops - JSRF is more about figuring out how to get through each level. Take away the skating and JSRF is basically the exact same game as the Knuckles stages in Sonic Adventure 2. JSR was a lot different.
I think Sega probably made the changes they did to appeal to a broader audience. They still don't seem entirely confident in their games these days, now that they're without their own captive audience on their own console - everything they do these days is really overly-broad and less focused. JSR always was intended to be sort of the equivalent of an art-house film - Sega never intended to sell a lot of copies, but they did hope the game brought them a lot of attention (which it did) and that it would help cement the Dreamcast's status as the home of the most creative games around.
When JSRF moved over to the Xbox, Sega had more power to play with but they didn't quite know who their demographic was... so they basically made a standard platformer that they thought people would be able to more easily identify with. I don't personally think it worked - the game didn't review as well as the original and it didn't sell any better either.
Jet Set/Grind Radio on the Dreamcast is really cheap at this point, as is the system itself. You could pick up both for $40 or less. I really recommend doing that if you liked JSRF; you'll probably like JSR that much more.
Judging from women's magazines most women either don't care or enjoy looking at attractive women.
This is actually a really good point. I actually think articles like this are completely off - I do agree in general that there is a very male slant to most video games in the gameplay department but the portrayal of women is not the real problem. It's a red herring. Most guys don't want to play as fat slobs and I doubt most girls would want to play as your average overweight soccer mom either. "Unrealistic" portrayals of characters in games are what people want, whether male or female. Games are a chance to escape from reality, to take on an alter-ego that you could never be in real life and to see other non-playing characters that you wish you could see in real life. Nobody wants a game filled with a bunch of realistic ugly people.
If the particular fashions on display are the issue, well, maybe game developers just need to hire a bunch of fashion consultants. Seriously though, there are games that I've played where my wife has actually said "wow, she's beautiful". Some developers are just better at this than others, like some developers are better at every other facet of game design than others. (Some examples of games my wife has complimented the character designs in include Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X-2 and Soul Calibur 2, but there are others I'm forgetting.) It's simply a measure of quality whether or not a developer gets the character designs right, just like it's a measure of quality whether they get the level designs or the monster designs or the weapons or the sounds right. Why are we treating it as if there's some sort of discrimination going on?
Every game is different, though, and every game has different goals for what it's trying to achieve. There is no one "right" character design style - what works in FFX is not going to work in GTA. I think the real argument is about creating more games with gameplay that appeals to women, and the character design will naturally follow from that.
(btw, I've always found fighting games to be great cross-gender fun - the focus on cool-looking moves that almost make a sort of dance out of every fight, combined with simple one-on-one gameplay seems to appeal to women despite the violence.)
It runs MS Office (and NeoOffice) and has that great "it just works" thing going for it.
Well, it "just works" until you have to try to set up a networked office printer, connect to a shared drive on a PC (or even another Mac), set up email to work with an Exchange server or mount a firewire drive with a file system other than the one your current version of the Mac OS expects. Then it basically doesn't work at all unless you know what you are doing. These sorts of things are for all intents and purposes automatic on a Windows machine - the most you'd ever need to know is your password. (btw, the above examples are all problems both I and others at my office have had with our Mac machines - including people who have never used anything but Macs for their entire lives.)
I run both a Windows and a Mac machine at work, sitting side by side. I alternate between them depending on the task, mainly because I've got a 30" widescreen LCD for the Mac, so obviously it's a lot better for things that require having a bunch of windows open at once.
But I don't consider the Mac any easier to use in most situations. It has a learning curve like anything else, and there are a lot of things that are just a lot harder than they should be (and a lot harder than the same tasks are on Windows machines). Of course, the reverse is also true on other tasks - installing software is much easier on a Mac, for example; so easy that the first time I had to do it, I didn't understand that after dragging the installer to my applications folder, I was done. I kept looking for the "install" button. But overall I don't think one has an inherent advantage over the other in usability.
I also run Linux at home. The Mac OS is definitely easier to use than Linux but in some ways (such as setting up a firewall, networking and file sharing) it is similarly difficult compared to Windows. But, there's never been a situation where I've needed to use the command shell under OS X, whereas I still need to do it all the time under Linux (SUSE 9.2).
Outside of 13 year olds, Who the hell gives a flying fuck about their IM popularity?
Maybe people who aren't cynical, boring assholes?
Jesus, some of you guys really need to lighten up. This is an office time-killer, that's all. I've sent it around to a few people I used to work with and still have on my IM list and it amused us for five minutes or so. What's the friggin' harm?
btw, I suck. I'm at 4,195. Every single person on my buddy list beats me by about five to one. Do I care? No, but it was fun to check out.
There are those of us who would argue that Nintendo's continuous and very public proclamations that "it's about the games, stupid" is its own form of hype. It's them saying "we know what's important, these other guys don't, and we're going to bring you the console that does what game consoles are supposed to do, unlike our competitors." That is hype, by both the dictionary and the colloquial definition. If they didn't want to hype, they would say nothing. After all, they have shown nothing of the Revolution, they have published no specs, they have not released the final design of the console, so why would they be talking about it besides hype? They have shown an empty box and said they're focusing on the games. That's their form of hype.
"Innovation is king"
Bongo-based games?
Are you serious? Even Shigeru Miyamoto himself has said this is basically ripped right off from Sega. I guess to you there is some massive difference between "bongo-based games" and "maraca-based games" - I personally don't see it.
4 player fighting games that actually work?
Capcom's been doing this at least as long as Nintendo has and probably longer.
A golf based RPG?
Huh?
What about a game that is really several hundred little games, which you only play for 5 seconds at a time?
I have dozens of these by different companies. They go by titles like "Intellivision Classics", "Namco Museum", etc.
Not to say WarioWare is not a good idea or that it's not a good game, but by your own criteria it is not innovative. All Nintendo did was look at these classic game compilations (including their own Game & Watch Gallery series compilations) and wonder if they could tweak the idea and come up with something new. The result was good, but it wasn't what I'd call a real invention.
Nintendo has done a lot of good things for the industry but they have also had their share of real cockups, and in general they seem to get a lot of credit for things they aren't really responsible for. It's really no different than how some people claim Apple is responsible for the GUI, when even Apple themselves acknowledge that they are not.
The DS, for example, is a nice device, but your claim that it is the first "dual-screened touch enabled handheld device with a microphone and wi-fi" is a little spurious. I mean I could say my HP laptop was the "first laptop with a black top and a silver bottom with two USB ports on one side and one on the other" - that doesn't mean anything whatsoever. All of those features have appeared on other devices individually - it didn't take a genius to put them together in one particular configuration. (I agree that the fact is nobody else did, but I'd argue it's because nobody else felt there was any great need to, not because it took a huge leap of imagination to invent anything special.)
Every one has their place, but leave Nintendo out of your "mainstream" talk, as they have never been the sheep of the industry.
I'm not sure what this means - Nintendo has never been mainstream? I don't think you can seriously be saying that. Nintendo used to define the mainstream. Nowadays they continue to try to but without nearly as much success. Just because they haven't been as successful as they used to does not mean they are not doing their best - they're not trying to be niche, which seems to be what you're suggesting. They're trying to sell as many systems and games as possible, as they always have. They would love nothing more to be mainstream; if you're saying they're not, then you're basically admitting their recent failures.
The worst VOIP provider had an availability of 94.8% (which isn't bad)
I disagree entirely! When someone's life may depend on a call going through (911) I would say anything below 99.99 (repeating) is unacceptable.
Seriously. 94.8% means there's a one in 20 chance that when you pick up your phone, it's not going to work. That is the equivalent of playing Russian Roulette in an emergency.
There is another problem with using VOIP. When the internet goes down your VOIP phone may go with it.
In addition to the issue you mentioned, you forgot about a simple power failure.
When the power went out in the northeast of the US a year or two ago, VoIP was toast. And that's exactly the sort of time you don't want your phone going down.
(Of course, this is also true of cordless phones, but anyone can head to a drug store in a major power outage and buy a $10 AT&T corded phone if they don't already have one. This cannot be done for a VoIP phone, though.)
However, 10% really isn't all that big of a number.
I agree. I'd also like to know how many of that 10% are active Live users. I remember another number MS trumpeted when Halo 2 was fairly new that, if you also did the arithmetic, suggested only 9% of Halo 2 owners had ever taken the game online, and only a tiny percentage were online at any given time.
Myself, I let my XBL subscription lapse last year. I just got annoyed with all the teen and pre-teen idiots floating around, and found that the level of competition was generally actually significantly below what the computer AI could give me. For example, there was one course in PGR2 where all my human opponents would crash into the wall on the same turn every single time around the track. When everybody was running in a pack and this happened simultaneously, it was pretty funny. But it was not very good competition, or very much fun if you really wanted to race. All XBL has proven to me is how dumb humans are, both in their gameplay and in their witty banter during gameplay.
I'm willing to bet that online gaming will continue to grow and probably peak at around 60% in some cases where it's free and easy to use and as low as 20% in instances where fees are associated.
That's probably about right, though the 60% number for free access seems a little high. Other than online-only games, I can't think of even many PC games that get that kind of online participation, or that ever would.
I think the reality that a lot of companies don't want to acknowledge at the moment is that there are a lot of people - in fact probably a large majority of people - who want to play games but just do not want to play online. They know about online games (hell, if you own an Xbox, you know about Xbox Live), they have the money to pay for it if need be, but they just do not want to play that way. It's just not as great of an experience as it was promised to be. This isn't true of every developer or publisher, but it is true of those who have really leveraged their entire future on online business models, and who are pushing the marketing dollars heavily in that direction.
There's a lot of hype in online gaming right now, but the reality just doesn't match that hype, either in the user experience or in the number of players. I don't think online is going away, and I also think it will grow slowly over time, but it will reach a saturation point that I think is much lower than companies like Microsoft think it is. Then we'll have a period of adjustment, and eventually an equillibrium where both online and offline games co-exist, but with traditional offline gaming regaining some of the cachet that it's lost.
The way MS and others hype online gaming, you'd think everybody played that way... but by MS's own numbers, at least 90% of their own customers do not subscribe to their online service, and in fact the growth of the console installed base itself is outstripping the growth of the base of XBL users. (In other words, the percentage of wired Xboxes is actually dropping over time, even as the total number of XBL users slowly rises.)
No matter what kind of fines and punishments R* gets for the scenes, all the publicity created by the scandal certainly will attract enough customers to more than cover the expenses.
Let's put a stop to this thinking right now - I'm seeing it elsewhere too.
The important part: As a result of the re-rating of the game, Take-Two is lowering guidance for the third fiscal quarter ending July 31, 2005 to $160 to $170 million in net sales and a net loss per share of $(0.40) to $(0.45) to provide reserves for the value of the title's current North American retail inventory. Accordingly, guidance for the fiscal year ending October 31, 2005 is also being lowered to $1.26 to $1.31 billion in net sales and $1.05 to $1.12 in diluted earnings per share.
Pretty much definitively refutes your theory, and that's straight from the horse's mouth.
The Guardian is a large UK-based newspaper. I would presume they've gotten in on the blogging thing like a lot of mainstream US-based outlets have as well (MSNBC et. al).
But that still doesn't mean we should care. I didn't bother R'ingTFA because I really don't see what a UK-based newspaper can offer me as insight into a US-based "scandal". This would be like me writing a blog about how the mayor of London is an idiot. I mean, what the hell do I know? I don't live there, I don't know the people there, I've only even been there once.
I do agree that this scandal is overblown, but jesus, if a guy in another country finds Hillary Clinton's rants "boring", he doesn't have to listen to her, does he? Why is he even bothering to write this? Why am I?
Re:I'm willing to bet RE5 will come to the Revolut
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Resident Evil 5 Details
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I think Nintendo is not alowing any anouncements untill after SpaceWorld.
What Space World? Nintendo, AFAIK, has not announced any Space World for 2005, and it's already July.
This is what IGN wrote on May 19, two months ago:
"Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto reiterated Kaplan's comments in a recent interview, saying that more Revolution information would be forthcoming sooner rather than later, and that a new Space World was under consideration."
That was two months ago. "Sooner rather than later" is probably pretty much passed by now, and it's pretty clear that it's too late to organize a Space World show on such short notice at this point. Space World is traditionally held in August, either just before or just after Obon. They could hold it at a different time of year but that would dilute its effectiveness - I mean there are reasons why they hold it in August vs., say, November (it's cold in Tokyo! And kids are in school) or December (too late for Christmas) or January or February or March. The window for this year is probably already closed; next spring is probably the earliest they could organize and put on such a large-scale show.
I'm done being a Nintendo apologist (I used to be); I don't see anything they're doing with the Revolution that's giving me any hope for them whatsoever. Maybe they'll carve out their own little profitable niche with their classic games and their cheap hardware, but their lack of HD is really going to hurt them in the long-term, and that probably corresponds with an overall lack of graphics power that's going to hurt them with developers right from the get-go.
Keeping all this info hushed is really starting to get me pissed off. Its like Hey look at all the games I can get on the PS3 and Xbox360. But what does Nintendo have announced? NES, SNES and N64 games -_-x
Now we're on the same page. It seems most likely to me that Nintendo was caught flat-footed and is now in the process of formulating a strategy. It seems clear that they're not actually following a planned strategy right now - they're sort of making it up as they go along, and throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. People like the downloadable games, so they're keeping that. People didn't like that you have to pay for them, so now they're evaluating which games might be considered premiums. They don't seem to know what to do with third party developers. They have no real hardware to show or demonstrate or even give anybody the specs of. There are no dev kits that anybody knows anything about. They seem to be flying on a wing and a prayer right now.
I think it's pretty likely that RE5 is not planned for the Revolution at the moment, simply because Nintendo has not given anybody any reason to think this is a viable platform as of yet. Obviously, Capcom, like all experienced publishers, knows to keep their options open so they say things like "we could always bring it to other platforms later". There's no exclusivity with anybody. But that doesn't mean they're even considering a Revolution port at this point, just that they're going to wait and see what happens before pouring a bunch of resources into it.
I agree. A lot of this depends on where you live; in NYC, during winter it gets dark at around 4:30PM, and the temperature drops accordingly. It's depressing. There is very little daylight as it is during winter, and then to have to leave work at 6PM and it's pitch black and 10 degrees (farenheit) outside... man, give me DST year-round and I will be your friend for life.
Obviously, someone who lives in Arizona is not going to understand this.
Just like how everybody laughs at our school systems due to the fact that zero of the American school systems teach any foreign languages until high school while other countries (actually nearly every) teach anywhere from 1 - 3 NEW and NOT FLUENTLY SPOKEN languages to their children right from the get-go (or nearly so).
Well, I went to public school in the US and I learned Spanish and German starting in the 4th grade.
This is the thing about the United States that people from other (smaller) countries don't seem to grasp... and as you illustrate, even a lot of Americans forget it. It's a huge country, and it's very regional. There are 50 states. There are tens of thousands of school districts within those states. Every district does things differently. Is it fair? No. But you can't generalize like this about the US, about almost anything.
I'd be willing to put money down that there are more fluent Spanish-speaking Americans than fluent English-speaking Spaniards, even as a percentage of the population.
I know fujitsu also has this coating and so does hp (they call it brightview). Could anyone explain what it is or how it works? Is it even the coating which makes it brighter or is it something related to the display or backlight?
They may be doing something different with the backlight but I'm sure the screen coating is just affecting light refraction, which helps create a wider viewing angle. I'm not convinced that these screens are in any way actually "brighter" than regular LCD screens (in fact, almost every LCD screen I've used over the past three years has been too bright by default, special coating or not), but they do have somewhat better viewing angles.
I think these screens are basically a gimmick, though, because I think what most people are seeing when they seem so impressive in a showroom is just the "glossiness" of the glass-like coating. In actual use, I can't see this being anything other than a distraction.
The two big things I've noticed from these screens whenever I've seen them in a store are the ease with which they attract fingerprints and dust and the almost ludicrous level of glare. The whole point of not having any kind of coating on most LCD screens is that it reduces glare to almost nothing - "Brightview" screens negate that advantage completely.
I personally would not buy a screen with this sort of coating on it. There are reasons why pro level LCD monitors (like Apple's own Cinema Displays) do not have this sort of thing. IMO, it's just a gimmick to jack up the price of otherwise cheap laptops to people who don't know any better.
btw, to return to an earlier point... there's no big mystery to making a "bright" LCD screen. Stick a really strong backlight in it and you're done. Any designer or photographer, though, will tell you that there is a limit to how bright a screen should be (heck, all you've gotta know is you're not supposed to look directly at the sun to also know that there are absolute limits to the brightness level we can comfortably tolerate), and most modern LCD's are beyond that limit as it is unless you dial them down.
That doesn't mean the current iBook's screen is not sub-par, though - I haven't really looked at them. There are probably still screens out there that are dimmer than most.
Re:Okay, I have to continue my commentary...
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The Handheld War
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It's the games where the money is made after all...
This is kind of a myth. It's only ever true for about the first year or so of any new console's existence, but plenty of systems have been profitable from a hardware standpoint on day one (the GBA SP, for example).
It is true that most recent consoles have necessitated a period of losses in order to subsidize market share gains that would later reap profits. But this isn't always the case, nor is it really a fact that it's the system itself causing those losses - often, the retail price of the system may be greater than the cost of its parts at launch, but when you add things like R&D costs, marketing, distribution, and general overhead into the mix, the company or division responsible for producing the system loses money overall.
There is definitely a distinction, though, between the business model of selling game systems and games vs. the business model of selling razors and blades. That's the analogy I always see but it's not a proper analogy. A better analogy, at least in this context, would be between the business model of the game industry and the business model of the auto industry (cars and gasoline). Everybody who drives needs gasoline; a car is useless without it. But that doesn't mean the car manufacturer makes all of its profits on deals made with the oil companies, with the cars sold as loss leaders. They still make profits directly on the cars, however small those profits may be (and a lot of manufacturers only make about a 0.5% profit margin on some models). Of course, they also may hold stock in or have other deals with oil companies and gasoline stations, so they make money both ways.
The PSP is likely the only system on the market - handheld or otherwise - that is not directly profitable in and of itself right now. (That doesn't mean those profits are necessarily enough to overcome deficits created by other inefficiencies at a company, it just means each sale of hardware alone more than pays for itself.)
Considering that the present United States is itself a colony of people from all over the world, your point is a bit moot. The internet transcends geographic boundaries and the control must be international.
The United States is not a "colony of people from all over the world". The vast majority of Americans were born here.
I realize what you were trying to say, but does it really have any bearing whatsoever on the discussion to know, for example, that one of the inventors of the internet has ancestors that came over on the Mayflower hundreds of years ago? Talk about moot.
The UN could make a fresh beginning and make the internet really secure.
And on what record do you base this assumption? The UN has not done a whole hell of a lot lately to keep the world secure.
The US hasn't either, but the difference is in 3 years George Bush will be gone, but the UN will still be around bickering amongst itself and just generally doing nothing. I'd put my bets on the US any day, for the long term.
Besides, it's worth remembering that the internet was created as a US defense department program to guard against a nuclear attack. Asking the US to give it up is really no different than asking us to hand over the plans to the B-2 bomber to the UN - it just ain't gonna happen. It is a national security issue.
If the rest of the world wants its own internet under the auspices of the UN, let them develop it. In the meantime, the US has never done anything to restrict the growth of the current US-controlled system, so why complain? I see no reason why we should have to give something up simply because other people want it - has the rest of the world just become the equivalent of a spoiled child?
The UN isn't in the business of overthrowing governments.
I think you might want to read up a bit on why, exactly, the United Nations was founded. This article may or may not be believed in its entirety, but the fact of the matter is one way or another, the UN was conceived during WWII and was officially founded directly afterwards specifically to prevent dictators running roughshod over their neighbors all over the world. That was the original mandate, and that's why the five permanent members of the security council are who they are.
Even the UN's official history is perfectly up front about its origins as a tool of the Allies in fighting Germany and Japan during WWII.
Now you see why many people in the US (and other countries) think the UN has gotten so far off track from its original mandate that it is no longer relevant. It was intended to at least contain, occasionally fight and if necessary overthrow dangerous governments like those of Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein. Whether you want to believe it or not, and whether you agree with that cause, that is the truth.
I am no neo-con (or even a traditional-con); I voted against Bush both times. But I get just as annoyed as anyone when people speak of the UN as if its purpose is to keep anyone from fighting, ever. That was not why it was created. It was created to keep rogue states in check - that is the entire reason it exists. It was created during wartime, with a mandate that specifically told member nations to keep fighting. Yet nowadays, it is only ever used as an excuse to do nothing because of competing political interests from those who have something to gain by standing on the sidelines.
As for the UN taking over the internet... read any of what I just posted (either the two links or my commentary, whether you subscribe to the same view or not) and tell me how this would make a lick of sense.
Your theory (which is what it is after all) seems interesting except for a detail, if western is so "IN" then shouldnt they be interested in western games as well?
Two things:
1. They are interested in western games. They are just not interested in bad western games. American and to some extent European audiences don't seem to see the difference. I mean what are you expecting, a crap GTA ripoff like True Crime: Streets of LA to sell as many copies in Japan as here? A mediocre shooter like Halo selling millions of copies? The fact that American gamers have lost their sense of taste doesn't mean everybody else in the world has.
But good western games do sell there. GTA3 has sold close to 500,000 copies and Vice City also topped the charts, as two examples. EA's sports games also do pretty well. Right now, a Ghost Recon game is sitting at #17. So it's not true that they will not buy western games; they will buy them if they think they're good.
Also, you're assuming every western game is even released there, which is not the case at all. The Xbox library in Japan is miniscule in comparison to here. The number of PS2 games from the west is also tiny there. If they had the choice, they'd probably buy even more than they do - I mean the Xbox is not the only system in the world that western developers release games for.
But...
2. Just because a culture is considered hip or cool doesn't mean every single aspect of that culture has to be accepted. The point I was making is that it's foolish to suggest that the Japanese are generally xenophobic or nationalistic - they are no moreso than any other country, and the fact that so many western brands and products are popular there is proof of that. That doesn't mean they need to have exactly the same tastes as we do, or that they need to accept anything we shove down their throats. This is exactly what MS thought would happen when they released the Xbox originally there, and when it didn't, they acted shocked and surprised. You've got that same mentality.
On the one hand you can take something and say "oh, the Japanese love western culture, so as long as we market this, they'll buy it", and on the other hand you can throw up your hands and say "oh, they're just a bunch of xenophobes, they hate everything that's not Japanese". Neither of these statements is true in the slightest, and I was neither implying nor stating they were.
What I was stating was that there is no ingrained bias against foreign products, and that in fact in parts of the demographic there is an ingrained bias in favor of foreign products. That doesn't mean you don't still have to take individual tastes into account.
There is no big mystery about the Japanese consumer mentality, but it still seems like so many people just don't get it. In almost all basic ways they are just like us. That doesn't mean they have the same tastes as us, but they do make their decisions basically the same way - i.e. "has this company made products I've been happy with before? What is their reputation? Do my friends like their products? Does the product look good? Will the product fit in my house? And do the sub-products [e.g. games] that go along with it also meet those criteria?" It really is not rocket science, but it does require some homework to identify and understand the differing cultural tastes at work.
Guess what? people who believe the Japanese are a bit protectionist may not be idiots after all.
I see you've taken that personally. Looks like I hit the mark.
Only about a hundred times, both as part of my former job in the video game industry and for pleasure.
Since all of us have AIDS and enjoy raping japanese youths, you won't live long enough to enjoy the close company of many Japanese.
You'd probably want to inform my wife of that. She was born and raised in Ryu-Gasaki. How do you think I know about western Japanese weddings?
btw, you are one of the "people" I was referring to in my original post. If this is your idea of what Japanese people think of us, then you are at best misinformed.
Is protectionism a factor in the same people many people would only buy domestic cars?
(I'm guessing your first "people" should be "way")
Some people (or as I like to call them, "idiots") suggested when the Xbox first bombed in Japan that it was because of some sort of "racism" or xenophobia against westerners. You don't seem to be going that far, which is good, but I should probably try to head this off before it goes down that road...
The Japanese have no xenophobia towards westerners. In fact, just the opposite - American and European products are "in" in Japan and have been for some time now. Levi's, McDonald's, Starbucks, Gucci, Prada, all incredibly powerful and popular brands in Japan. Western-style clothing has completely replaced Japanese-style clothing, western-style weddings are now standard (even if the participants are not Christian), and for a while the #1 film of all time there was Titanic. Even Pearl Harbor did pretty good box office, considering!
So to even suggest there's protectionism, xenophobia or worse, "racism" going on is at best ignorant.
The fact is MS just got it so completely wrong with the original Xbox that they will probably never recover there. They paid absolutely no attention to the wants of Japanese gamers at first - they do have different tastes, and they have different wants and needs as far as the design of the console itself goes. The system was not what they wanted, the games were not what they wanted.
One thing about Japan is there is a lot of brand loyalty, and conversely a lot of brand avoidance. If a company gets a reputation, it is very hard to shake that reputation. The Xbox pretty quickly got a reputation as being big, ugly, unreliable (the scratched disc issue was a big story there), with bad games that nobody wanted to play. Despite the marketing for the 360, that reputation is going to be a very tough thing to overcome there. If you ask a gamer in Japan what they think of when they hear "Xbox", the most likely answer is going to be "kusoge" (I'll leave you to look that up).
Even ignoring that, though, I'm not convinced the Xbox 360 has overcome all of the original Xbox's issues. It is still big. It is still not styled the way the Japanese expect a console to be styled. (Painting the thing white does not automatically make it look like a Japanese product.) The PS3 has some issues too, but Sony's brand loyalty can overcome that. MS is not operating from that position of strength there so they really had to nail the design of the system, and they didn't. At least not for Japan, despite all their best efforts (including consulting with a Japanese design studio - who they seem to have totally ignored).
I have a feeling MS will get more than 2% of the market when all is said and done, as they really are making a push with developers there this time. But they will still be a very distant third, and I'm not sure the ROI is going to justify the effort and expense.
It's much like how journalism is an objective view of events.
This is typical of the mangled view of journalism many people seem to have these days...
Nobody ever said journalism was supposed to be objective. Journalism, in its purest form, is supposed to be factual and truthful. Is it objective to say that the Nazi's murdered 6 million jews and 6 million others they considered anti-Aryan? Do we necessarily have to get "their side of the story" on this? No - the fact is they did murder all those people, in gas chambers, in medical experiments, or simply by firing squad. There is no point in trying to present a "fair and balanced" account of this. It's not the journalist's job to present every point of view (think of what the word "journal" actually means); it's simply his job to present the horror that's happening in front of him, from his own perspective. We don't ask journalists to stop being human. The actual arguments in favor of or against what's been reported should be made in op-ed pieces that are labeled as such.
I just get annoyed when I see reports today that say things like "Study finds media gives Bush little positive coverage" - I mean, to me, that's an indication that he hasn't done anything to deserve positive coverage, not an indication of intentional bias. The job of the media isn't to simply spread things out evenly so that every single story gives equal weight to all viewpoints and arguments. The job of the media is just to report what's going on, from the perspective of the reporter and what they judge would be important to the reader. If bad things are happening, then bad things are happening. If somebody does something illegal or unethical, then it gets reported that way.
Similarly, a simulation (in the context of gaming) is not supposed to present "reality" in any more an unbiased way than we as humans perceive reality. I'm sure my cat perceives reality much differently than I do, but I'm not generally very interested in seeing everything in terms of when my next meal is or whether my owner wants to pet me. So by definition, you're accepting a certain perception of reality in your simulations as it is. Why do you draw the line at political or ethical considerations? Why does every simulation need to present the same watered-down, even-handed viewpoint?
If you find a simulation and you don't like the reality it's presenting, just buy a different one. The nice thing about all this is it means we have a choice, which we wouldn't if every simulation simply presented a completely "balanced" and unbiased reality - such a simulation would necessarily be basically utterly useless. It's the same thing as the old argument about the map that's so accurate that it's indistinguishable from the real thing, but utterly worthless because it is also the same size. If you want to play a simulation that simply presents a completely unbiased, accurate world, why not just open your eyes and go outside? It doesn't sound like you really want to be playing a game to begin with.
As an employee of a major video games retailer, I can state that we sell far more PSP systems, games, and movies than we sell in DS. I don't have the actual numbers available here, but I'd wager it's almost a 10:1 ratio. Worldwide the DS might be on par with the PSP, but not in my local experience.
Well, the PSP is not even on sale in Europe yet, so obviously the DS outsells it there.
The DS is also currently outselling the PSP in Japan by a pretty significant margin (scroll down a bit), and is now ahead on total numbers there too, coming from behind earlier in the year.
I don't doubt that your individual store in the US sells more PSP's than DS's, but as others have pointed out, the DS is far more appealing to the casual Wal-Mart gaming crowd than the PSP is. It's possible that the PSP may outsell the DS at places like EB and GameStop while the DS destroys the PSP at department stores and discount centers. The latter would be a far greater retail presence. I haven't seen actual sales numbers for the US (US console sales numbers are always hard to come by), but I can almost guarantee the PSP is not outselling the DS by a "10:1 ratio" nationwide, and it would surprise me if the DS was not outselling the PSP just as it is in Japan.
If you go by Sony and Nintendo's own statements, then the DS is outselling the PSP worldwide by about 2:1 overall. Knowing the situation in Europe and Japan, you can basically deduce from that that things are at least roughly equal here in the US, and it's pretty likely that the DS is ahead.
The difference between AO vs. M is purely perception.
No, it is not. The ESRB has clear guidelines on when a title must be AO, with clear criteria for meeting that standard. Full frontal nudity, for example, is always supposed to be AO (partial nudity, including toplessness, is not necessarily AO unless it's during a sex scene). The ESRB doesn't publicize these criteria but I've attended several of their meetings on content ratings when I worked in the industry, and I've even still got a few of their guidelines packets lying around...
There'd be no reason to even have an AO rating if the difference was merely perception.
Because of these differences, most stores will not carry AO titles, in the same way most video stores do not carry X-rated DVD's. It's just more trouble than it's worth for the stores; they'd have to have a walled-off section for a very small selection of not-very-popular games, they'd have to deal with a lot of negative publicity and the constant threat of government action. (The industry itself deals with this anyway, but individual stores have no reason to want to get involved in it.)
I don't know if this mini-game would have caused SA to get an AO rating; unless there's nudity along with the sex, I really do doubt it. I've only seen a few screenshots and the ones I've seen have all had the characters fully clothed, just as they are in the rest of the game. I'm not sure "simulated" sex, which is what fully-clothed sex pretty much by definition is (whether performed by real people or digital characters) is enough to get the video game equivalent of an X rating.
Keita Takahashi's speech at the Game Developer's Conference was very interesting, to say the least, and I think more game developers would benefit from listening to what he has to say.
I read that, and I honestly don't think he said much, at least if the story you linked to really got to the essence of his point. From the story, his point seems to be that games aren't very important, that he isn't very good at creating them, and that Katamari Damacy only turned out the way it did because he couldn't figure out how to do what he really wanted to do. He even said simple isn't necessarily best, it's just all he knows how to do.
I don't really see how this helps anybody in the game industry.
His first argument is probably the only one that carries any weight, although it's also the one most likely to be ignored. Game creators do have a sense of self-importance that leads them to create these massively pompous epics that play more like work than games. I don't just mean RPG's, either; I mean almost all games today. If more game creators would take the attitude that what they're doing doesn't really matter, I honestly think we'd get some better games.
Unfortunately, human nature doesn't work that way - nobody wants to think that what they're doing is irrelevant.
If what you took from his speech is that games should be more simple and accessible, well, he pretty much said exactly the opposite. I'd look more to a guy like Shigeru Miyamoto for that sentiment, although he hasn't really been backing up his words with his games lately, and anyway the public seems to be moving in a different direction.
KD at least proved that there is still a market for a really good, innovative, different type of game that's played strictly for the fun of it rather than trying to wow with graphics or create some sort of community of grind addicts online. Unfortunately, I don't see a mad rush of developers trying to emulate what KD did - all I see in the pipeline is a continuing and seemingly endless stream of GTA, Halo, and Everquest clones.
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The game's soundtrack has one a track which has to be among those most annoying, yet strangely attractive songs, ever; I am obviously referring to Birthday Cake,
Birthday Cake by Cibo Matto is not on the Jet Grind Radio soundtrack. It's on the Jet Set Radio Future soundtrack. These are two different games with two different soundtracks. It's a matter of taste which you like better, but most people put the original soundtrack up there with the best ever... JSRF's soundtrack is usually not spoken of with quite the same reverence.
btw, here is Wikipedia's page on Cibo Matto. I actually saw them live before they even put an album out at a Lush concert in NYC (where they were based). They were an interesting band... really just two girls with a Casio keyboard at the time I saw them. Their ideas really came out more in the studio.
I've not played the Dreamcast game, but Jet Set Radio Future is one of my favorite games. A perfect marriage of style and substance.
If you liked JSRF, you'll love JSR/(JGR). A lot of people, myself included, thought JSRF tipped the balance a bit too far to the "style" side of the substance/style equation, and it really was a fundamentally different game. In the original game, for example, you actually had to do a series of stick movements to "write" your graffiti, and the harder the tag, the more complex your stick movements had to be. Obviously this meant that if you were being chased, you really had to be quick and precise with your control.
Sega removed this completely from JSRF, which is a lot more of a straight platformer with a distinctive visual style. (This isn't the only major change, but it's one example of the type of changes Sega made to JSRF.) JSR was really all about tagging and outwitting the cops - JSRF is more about figuring out how to get through each level. Take away the skating and JSRF is basically the exact same game as the Knuckles stages in Sonic Adventure 2. JSR was a lot different.
I think Sega probably made the changes they did to appeal to a broader audience. They still don't seem entirely confident in their games these days, now that they're without their own captive audience on their own console - everything they do these days is really overly-broad and less focused. JSR always was intended to be sort of the equivalent of an art-house film - Sega never intended to sell a lot of copies, but they did hope the game brought them a lot of attention (which it did) and that it would help cement the Dreamcast's status as the home of the most creative games around.
When JSRF moved over to the Xbox, Sega had more power to play with but they didn't quite know who their demographic was... so they basically made a standard platformer that they thought people would be able to more easily identify with. I don't personally think it worked - the game didn't review as well as the original and it didn't sell any better either.
Jet Set/Grind Radio on the Dreamcast is really cheap at this point, as is the system itself. You could pick up both for $40 or less. I really recommend doing that if you liked JSRF; you'll probably like JSR that much more.
Judging from women's magazines most women either don't care or enjoy looking at attractive women.
This is actually a really good point. I actually think articles like this are completely off - I do agree in general that there is a very male slant to most video games in the gameplay department but the portrayal of women is not the real problem. It's a red herring. Most guys don't want to play as fat slobs and I doubt most girls would want to play as your average overweight soccer mom either. "Unrealistic" portrayals of characters in games are what people want, whether male or female. Games are a chance to escape from reality, to take on an alter-ego that you could never be in real life and to see other non-playing characters that you wish you could see in real life. Nobody wants a game filled with a bunch of realistic ugly people.
If the particular fashions on display are the issue, well, maybe game developers just need to hire a bunch of fashion consultants. Seriously though, there are games that I've played where my wife has actually said "wow, she's beautiful". Some developers are just better at this than others, like some developers are better at every other facet of game design than others. (Some examples of games my wife has complimented the character designs in include Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X-2 and Soul Calibur 2, but there are others I'm forgetting.) It's simply a measure of quality whether or not a developer gets the character designs right, just like it's a measure of quality whether they get the level designs or the monster designs or the weapons or the sounds right. Why are we treating it as if there's some sort of discrimination going on?
Every game is different, though, and every game has different goals for what it's trying to achieve. There is no one "right" character design style - what works in FFX is not going to work in GTA. I think the real argument is about creating more games with gameplay that appeals to women, and the character design will naturally follow from that.
(btw, I've always found fighting games to be great cross-gender fun - the focus on cool-looking moves that almost make a sort of dance out of every fight, combined with simple one-on-one gameplay seems to appeal to women despite the violence.)
It runs MS Office (and NeoOffice) and has that great "it just works" thing going for it.
Well, it "just works" until you have to try to set up a networked office printer, connect to a shared drive on a PC (or even another Mac), set up email to work with an Exchange server or mount a firewire drive with a file system other than the one your current version of the Mac OS expects. Then it basically doesn't work at all unless you know what you are doing. These sorts of things are for all intents and purposes automatic on a Windows machine - the most you'd ever need to know is your password. (btw, the above examples are all problems both I and others at my office have had with our Mac machines - including people who have never used anything but Macs for their entire lives.)
I run both a Windows and a Mac machine at work, sitting side by side. I alternate between them depending on the task, mainly because I've got a 30" widescreen LCD for the Mac, so obviously it's a lot better for things that require having a bunch of windows open at once.
But I don't consider the Mac any easier to use in most situations. It has a learning curve like anything else, and there are a lot of things that are just a lot harder than they should be (and a lot harder than the same tasks are on Windows machines). Of course, the reverse is also true on other tasks - installing software is much easier on a Mac, for example; so easy that the first time I had to do it, I didn't understand that after dragging the installer to my applications folder, I was done. I kept looking for the "install" button. But overall I don't think one has an inherent advantage over the other in usability.
I also run Linux at home. The Mac OS is definitely easier to use than Linux but in some ways (such as setting up a firewall, networking and file sharing) it is similarly difficult compared to Windows. But, there's never been a situation where I've needed to use the command shell under OS X, whereas I still need to do it all the time under Linux (SUSE 9.2).
Outside of 13 year olds, Who the hell gives a flying fuck about their IM popularity?
Maybe people who aren't cynical, boring assholes?
Jesus, some of you guys really need to lighten up. This is an office time-killer, that's all. I've sent it around to a few people I used to work with and still have on my IM list and it amused us for five minutes or so. What's the friggin' harm?
btw, I suck. I'm at 4,195. Every single person on my buddy list beats me by about five to one. Do I care? No, but it was fun to check out.
What hype is there on the revolution?
There are those of us who would argue that Nintendo's continuous and very public proclamations that "it's about the games, stupid" is its own form of hype. It's them saying "we know what's important, these other guys don't, and we're going to bring you the console that does what game consoles are supposed to do, unlike our competitors." That is hype, by both the dictionary and the colloquial definition. If they didn't want to hype, they would say nothing. After all, they have shown nothing of the Revolution, they have published no specs, they have not released the final design of the console, so why would they be talking about it besides hype? They have shown an empty box and said they're focusing on the games. That's their form of hype.
"Innovation is king"
Bongo-based games?
Are you serious? Even Shigeru Miyamoto himself has said this is basically ripped right off from Sega. I guess to you there is some massive difference between "bongo-based games" and "maraca-based games" - I personally don't see it.
4 player fighting games that actually work?
Capcom's been doing this at least as long as Nintendo has and probably longer.
A golf based RPG?
Huh?
What about a game that is really several hundred little games, which you only play for 5 seconds at a time?
I have dozens of these by different companies. They go by titles like "Intellivision Classics", "Namco Museum", etc.
Not to say WarioWare is not a good idea or that it's not a good game, but by your own criteria it is not innovative. All Nintendo did was look at these classic game compilations (including their own Game & Watch Gallery series compilations) and wonder if they could tweak the idea and come up with something new. The result was good, but it wasn't what I'd call a real invention.
Nintendo has done a lot of good things for the industry but they have also had their share of real cockups, and in general they seem to get a lot of credit for things they aren't really responsible for. It's really no different than how some people claim Apple is responsible for the GUI, when even Apple themselves acknowledge that they are not.
The DS, for example, is a nice device, but your claim that it is the first "dual-screened touch enabled handheld device with a microphone and wi-fi" is a little spurious. I mean I could say my HP laptop was the "first laptop with a black top and a silver bottom with two USB ports on one side and one on the other" - that doesn't mean anything whatsoever. All of those features have appeared on other devices individually - it didn't take a genius to put them together in one particular configuration. (I agree that the fact is nobody else did, but I'd argue it's because nobody else felt there was any great need to, not because it took a huge leap of imagination to invent anything special.)
Every one has their place, but leave Nintendo out of your "mainstream" talk, as they have never been the sheep of the industry.
I'm not sure what this means - Nintendo has never been mainstream? I don't think you can seriously be saying that. Nintendo used to define the mainstream. Nowadays they continue to try to but without nearly as much success. Just because they haven't been as successful as they used to does not mean they are not doing their best - they're not trying to be niche, which seems to be what you're suggesting. They're trying to sell as many systems and games as possible, as they always have. They would love nothing more to be mainstream; if you're saying they're not, then you're basically admitting their recent failures.
The worst VOIP provider had an availability of 94.8% (which isn't bad)
I disagree entirely! When someone's life may depend on a call going through (911) I would say anything below 99.99 (repeating) is unacceptable.
Seriously. 94.8% means there's a one in 20 chance that when you pick up your phone, it's not going to work. That is the equivalent of playing Russian Roulette in an emergency.
There is another problem with using VOIP. When the internet goes down your VOIP phone may go with it.
In addition to the issue you mentioned, you forgot about a simple power failure.
When the power went out in the northeast of the US a year or two ago, VoIP was toast. And that's exactly the sort of time you don't want your phone going down.
(Of course, this is also true of cordless phones, but anyone can head to a drug store in a major power outage and buy a $10 AT&T corded phone if they don't already have one. This cannot be done for a VoIP phone, though.)
However, 10% really isn't all that big of a number.
I agree. I'd also like to know how many of that 10% are active Live users. I remember another number MS trumpeted when Halo 2 was fairly new that, if you also did the arithmetic, suggested only 9% of Halo 2 owners had ever taken the game online, and only a tiny percentage were online at any given time.
Myself, I let my XBL subscription lapse last year. I just got annoyed with all the teen and pre-teen idiots floating around, and found that the level of competition was generally actually significantly below what the computer AI could give me. For example, there was one course in PGR2 where all my human opponents would crash into the wall on the same turn every single time around the track. When everybody was running in a pack and this happened simultaneously, it was pretty funny. But it was not very good competition, or very much fun if you really wanted to race. All XBL has proven to me is how dumb humans are, both in their gameplay and in their witty banter during gameplay.
I'm willing to bet that online gaming will continue to grow and probably peak at around 60% in some cases where it's free and easy to use and as low as 20% in instances where fees are associated.
That's probably about right, though the 60% number for free access seems a little high. Other than online-only games, I can't think of even many PC games that get that kind of online participation, or that ever would.
I think the reality that a lot of companies don't want to acknowledge at the moment is that there are a lot of people - in fact probably a large majority of people - who want to play games but just do not want to play online. They know about online games (hell, if you own an Xbox, you know about Xbox Live), they have the money to pay for it if need be, but they just do not want to play that way. It's just not as great of an experience as it was promised to be. This isn't true of every developer or publisher, but it is true of those who have really leveraged their entire future on online business models, and who are pushing the marketing dollars heavily in that direction.
There's a lot of hype in online gaming right now, but the reality just doesn't match that hype, either in the user experience or in the number of players. I don't think online is going away, and I also think it will grow slowly over time, but it will reach a saturation point that I think is much lower than companies like Microsoft think it is. Then we'll have a period of adjustment, and eventually an equillibrium where both online and offline games co-exist, but with traditional offline gaming regaining some of the cachet that it's lost.
The way MS and others hype online gaming, you'd think everybody played that way... but by MS's own numbers, at least 90% of their own customers do not subscribe to their online service, and in fact the growth of the console installed base itself is outstripping the growth of the base of XBL users. (In other words, the percentage of wired Xboxes is actually dropping over time, even as the total number of XBL users slowly rises.)
No matter what kind of fines and punishments R* gets for the scenes, all the publicity created by the scandal certainly will attract enough customers to more than cover the expenses.
Let's put a stop to this thinking right now - I'm seeing it elsewhere too.
Read this and learn how the real world works.
The important part: As a result of the re-rating of the game, Take-Two is lowering guidance for the third fiscal quarter ending July 31, 2005 to $160 to $170 million in net sales and a net loss per share of $(0.40) to $(0.45) to provide reserves for the value of the title's current North American retail inventory. Accordingly, guidance for the fiscal year ending October 31, 2005 is also being lowered to $1.26 to $1.31 billion in net sales and $1.05 to $1.12 in diluted earnings per share.
Pretty much definitively refutes your theory, and that's straight from the horse's mouth.
The Guardian is a large UK-based newspaper. I would presume they've gotten in on the blogging thing like a lot of mainstream US-based outlets have as well (MSNBC et. al).
But that still doesn't mean we should care. I didn't bother R'ingTFA because I really don't see what a UK-based newspaper can offer me as insight into a US-based "scandal". This would be like me writing a blog about how the mayor of London is an idiot. I mean, what the hell do I know? I don't live there, I don't know the people there, I've only even been there once.
I do agree that this scandal is overblown, but jesus, if a guy in another country finds Hillary Clinton's rants "boring", he doesn't have to listen to her, does he? Why is he even bothering to write this? Why am I?
I think Nintendo is not alowing any anouncements untill after SpaceWorld.
What Space World? Nintendo, AFAIK, has not announced any Space World for 2005, and it's already July.
This is what IGN wrote on May 19, two months ago:
"Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto reiterated Kaplan's comments in a recent interview, saying that more Revolution information would be forthcoming sooner rather than later, and that a new Space World was under consideration."
That was two months ago. "Sooner rather than later" is probably pretty much passed by now, and it's pretty clear that it's too late to organize a Space World show on such short notice at this point. Space World is traditionally held in August, either just before or just after Obon. They could hold it at a different time of year but that would dilute its effectiveness - I mean there are reasons why they hold it in August vs., say, November (it's cold in Tokyo! And kids are in school) or December (too late for Christmas) or January or February or March. The window for this year is probably already closed; next spring is probably the earliest they could organize and put on such a large-scale show.
I'm done being a Nintendo apologist (I used to be); I don't see anything they're doing with the Revolution that's giving me any hope for them whatsoever. Maybe they'll carve out their own little profitable niche with their classic games and their cheap hardware, but their lack of HD is really going to hurt them in the long-term, and that probably corresponds with an overall lack of graphics power that's going to hurt them with developers right from the get-go.
Keeping all this info hushed is really starting to get me pissed off. Its like Hey look at all the games I can get on the PS3 and Xbox360. But what does Nintendo have announced? NES, SNES and N64 games -_-x
Now we're on the same page. It seems most likely to me that Nintendo was caught flat-footed and is now in the process of formulating a strategy. It seems clear that they're not actually following a planned strategy right now - they're sort of making it up as they go along, and throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. People like the downloadable games, so they're keeping that. People didn't like that you have to pay for them, so now they're evaluating which games might be considered premiums. They don't seem to know what to do with third party developers. They have no real hardware to show or demonstrate or even give anybody the specs of. There are no dev kits that anybody knows anything about. They seem to be flying on a wing and a prayer right now.
I think it's pretty likely that RE5 is not planned for the Revolution at the moment, simply because Nintendo has not given anybody any reason to think this is a viable platform as of yet. Obviously, Capcom, like all experienced publishers, knows to keep their options open so they say things like "we could always bring it to other platforms later". There's no exclusivity with anybody. But that doesn't mean they're even considering a Revolution port at this point, just that they're going to wait and see what happens before pouring a bunch of resources into it.
In fact, I'd just assume have DST all year long.
I agree. A lot of this depends on where you live; in NYC, during winter it gets dark at around 4:30PM, and the temperature drops accordingly. It's depressing. There is very little daylight as it is during winter, and then to have to leave work at 6PM and it's pitch black and 10 degrees (farenheit) outside... man, give me DST year-round and I will be your friend for life.
Obviously, someone who lives in Arizona is not going to understand this.
Just like how everybody laughs at our school systems due to the fact that zero of the American school systems teach any foreign languages until high school while other countries (actually nearly every) teach anywhere from 1 - 3 NEW and NOT FLUENTLY SPOKEN languages to their children right from the get-go (or nearly so).
Well, I went to public school in the US and I learned Spanish and German starting in the 4th grade.
This is the thing about the United States that people from other (smaller) countries don't seem to grasp... and as you illustrate, even a lot of Americans forget it. It's a huge country, and it's very regional. There are 50 states. There are tens of thousands of school districts within those states. Every district does things differently. Is it fair? No. But you can't generalize like this about the US, about almost anything.
I'd be willing to put money down that there are more fluent Spanish-speaking Americans than fluent English-speaking Spaniards, even as a percentage of the population.
I know fujitsu also has this coating and so does hp (they call it brightview). Could anyone explain what it is or how it works? Is it even the coating which makes it brighter or is it something related to the display or backlight?
They may be doing something different with the backlight but I'm sure the screen coating is just affecting light refraction, which helps create a wider viewing angle. I'm not convinced that these screens are in any way actually "brighter" than regular LCD screens (in fact, almost every LCD screen I've used over the past three years has been too bright by default, special coating or not), but they do have somewhat better viewing angles.
I think these screens are basically a gimmick, though, because I think what most people are seeing when they seem so impressive in a showroom is just the "glossiness" of the glass-like coating. In actual use, I can't see this being anything other than a distraction.
The two big things I've noticed from these screens whenever I've seen them in a store are the ease with which they attract fingerprints and dust and the almost ludicrous level of glare. The whole point of not having any kind of coating on most LCD screens is that it reduces glare to almost nothing - "Brightview" screens negate that advantage completely.
I personally would not buy a screen with this sort of coating on it. There are reasons why pro level LCD monitors (like Apple's own Cinema Displays) do not have this sort of thing. IMO, it's just a gimmick to jack up the price of otherwise cheap laptops to people who don't know any better.
btw, to return to an earlier point... there's no big mystery to making a "bright" LCD screen. Stick a really strong backlight in it and you're done. Any designer or photographer, though, will tell you that there is a limit to how bright a screen should be (heck, all you've gotta know is you're not supposed to look directly at the sun to also know that there are absolute limits to the brightness level we can comfortably tolerate), and most modern LCD's are beyond that limit as it is unless you dial them down.
That doesn't mean the current iBook's screen is not sub-par, though - I haven't really looked at them. There are probably still screens out there that are dimmer than most.
It's the games where the money is made after all...
This is kind of a myth. It's only ever true for about the first year or so of any new console's existence, but plenty of systems have been profitable from a hardware standpoint on day one (the GBA SP, for example).
It is true that most recent consoles have necessitated a period of losses in order to subsidize market share gains that would later reap profits. But this isn't always the case, nor is it really a fact that it's the system itself causing those losses - often, the retail price of the system may be greater than the cost of its parts at launch, but when you add things like R&D costs, marketing, distribution, and general overhead into the mix, the company or division responsible for producing the system loses money overall.
There is definitely a distinction, though, between the business model of selling game systems and games vs. the business model of selling razors and blades. That's the analogy I always see but it's not a proper analogy. A better analogy, at least in this context, would be between the business model of the game industry and the business model of the auto industry (cars and gasoline). Everybody who drives needs gasoline; a car is useless without it. But that doesn't mean the car manufacturer makes all of its profits on deals made with the oil companies, with the cars sold as loss leaders. They still make profits directly on the cars, however small those profits may be (and a lot of manufacturers only make about a 0.5% profit margin on some models). Of course, they also may hold stock in or have other deals with oil companies and gasoline stations, so they make money both ways.
The PSP is likely the only system on the market - handheld or otherwise - that is not directly profitable in and of itself right now. (That doesn't mean those profits are necessarily enough to overcome deficits created by other inefficiencies at a company, it just means each sale of hardware alone more than pays for itself.)
Considering that the present United States is itself a colony of people from all over the world, your point is a bit moot. The internet transcends geographic boundaries and the control must be international.
The United States is not a "colony of people from all over the world". The vast majority of Americans were born here.
I realize what you were trying to say, but does it really have any bearing whatsoever on the discussion to know, for example, that one of the inventors of the internet has ancestors that came over on the Mayflower hundreds of years ago? Talk about moot.
The UN could make a fresh beginning and make the internet really secure.
And on what record do you base this assumption? The UN has not done a whole hell of a lot lately to keep the world secure.
The US hasn't either, but the difference is in 3 years George Bush will be gone, but the UN will still be around bickering amongst itself and just generally doing nothing. I'd put my bets on the US any day, for the long term.
Besides, it's worth remembering that the internet was created as a US defense department program to guard against a nuclear attack. Asking the US to give it up is really no different than asking us to hand over the plans to the B-2 bomber to the UN - it just ain't gonna happen. It is a national security issue.
If the rest of the world wants its own internet under the auspices of the UN, let them develop it. In the meantime, the US has never done anything to restrict the growth of the current US-controlled system, so why complain? I see no reason why we should have to give something up simply because other people want it - has the rest of the world just become the equivalent of a spoiled child?
How many mass murderers has the UN stopped?
The UN isn't in the business of overthrowing governments.
I think you might want to read up a bit on why, exactly, the United Nations was founded. This article may or may not be believed in its entirety, but the fact of the matter is one way or another, the UN was conceived during WWII and was officially founded directly afterwards specifically to prevent dictators running roughshod over their neighbors all over the world. That was the original mandate, and that's why the five permanent members of the security council are who they are.
Even the UN's official history is perfectly up front about its origins as a tool of the Allies in fighting Germany and Japan during WWII.
Now you see why many people in the US (and other countries) think the UN has gotten so far off track from its original mandate that it is no longer relevant. It was intended to at least contain, occasionally fight and if necessary overthrow dangerous governments like those of Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein. Whether you want to believe it or not, and whether you agree with that cause, that is the truth.
I am no neo-con (or even a traditional-con); I voted against Bush both times. But I get just as annoyed as anyone when people speak of the UN as if its purpose is to keep anyone from fighting, ever. That was not why it was created. It was created to keep rogue states in check - that is the entire reason it exists. It was created during wartime, with a mandate that specifically told member nations to keep fighting. Yet nowadays, it is only ever used as an excuse to do nothing because of competing political interests from those who have something to gain by standing on the sidelines.
As for the UN taking over the internet... read any of what I just posted (either the two links or my commentary, whether you subscribe to the same view or not) and tell me how this would make a lick of sense.
Your theory (which is what it is after all) seems interesting except for a detail, if western is so "IN" then shouldnt they be interested in western games as well?
Two things:
1. They are interested in western games. They are just not interested in bad western games. American and to some extent European audiences don't seem to see the difference. I mean what are you expecting, a crap GTA ripoff like True Crime: Streets of LA to sell as many copies in Japan as here? A mediocre shooter like Halo selling millions of copies? The fact that American gamers have lost their sense of taste doesn't mean everybody else in the world has.
But good western games do sell there. GTA3 has sold close to 500,000 copies and Vice City also topped the charts, as two examples. EA's sports games also do pretty well. Right now, a Ghost Recon game is sitting at #17. So it's not true that they will not buy western games; they will buy them if they think they're good.
Also, you're assuming every western game is even released there, which is not the case at all. The Xbox library in Japan is miniscule in comparison to here. The number of PS2 games from the west is also tiny there. If they had the choice, they'd probably buy even more than they do - I mean the Xbox is not the only system in the world that western developers release games for.
But...
2. Just because a culture is considered hip or cool doesn't mean every single aspect of that culture has to be accepted. The point I was making is that it's foolish to suggest that the Japanese are generally xenophobic or nationalistic - they are no moreso than any other country, and the fact that so many western brands and products are popular there is proof of that. That doesn't mean they need to have exactly the same tastes as we do, or that they need to accept anything we shove down their throats. This is exactly what MS thought would happen when they released the Xbox originally there, and when it didn't, they acted shocked and surprised. You've got that same mentality.
On the one hand you can take something and say "oh, the Japanese love western culture, so as long as we market this, they'll buy it", and on the other hand you can throw up your hands and say "oh, they're just a bunch of xenophobes, they hate everything that's not Japanese". Neither of these statements is true in the slightest, and I was neither implying nor stating they were.
What I was stating was that there is no ingrained bias against foreign products, and that in fact in parts of the demographic there is an ingrained bias in favor of foreign products. That doesn't mean you don't still have to take individual tastes into account.
There is no big mystery about the Japanese consumer mentality, but it still seems like so many people just don't get it. In almost all basic ways they are just like us. That doesn't mean they have the same tastes as us, but they do make their decisions basically the same way - i.e. "has this company made products I've been happy with before? What is their reputation? Do my friends like their products? Does the product look good? Will the product fit in my house? And do the sub-products [e.g. games] that go along with it also meet those criteria?" It really is not rocket science, but it does require some homework to identify and understand the differing cultural tastes at work.
Guess what? people who believe the Japanese are a bit protectionist may not be idiots after all.
I see you've taken that personally. Looks like I hit the mark.
May I enquire if you have been there?
Only about a hundred times, both as part of my former job in the video game industry and for pleasure.
Since all of us have AIDS and enjoy raping japanese youths, you won't live long enough to enjoy the close company of many Japanese.
You'd probably want to inform my wife of that. She was born and raised in Ryu-Gasaki. How do you think I know about western Japanese weddings?
btw, you are one of the "people" I was referring to in my original post. If this is your idea of what Japanese people think of us, then you are at best misinformed.
Is protectionism a factor in the same people many people would only buy domestic cars?
(I'm guessing your first "people" should be "way")
Some people (or as I like to call them, "idiots") suggested when the Xbox first bombed in Japan that it was because of some sort of "racism" or xenophobia against westerners. You don't seem to be going that far, which is good, but I should probably try to head this off before it goes down that road...
The Japanese have no xenophobia towards westerners. In fact, just the opposite - American and European products are "in" in Japan and have been for some time now. Levi's, McDonald's, Starbucks, Gucci, Prada, all incredibly powerful and popular brands in Japan. Western-style clothing has completely replaced Japanese-style clothing, western-style weddings are now standard (even if the participants are not Christian), and for a while the #1 film of all time there was Titanic. Even Pearl Harbor did pretty good box office, considering!
So to even suggest there's protectionism, xenophobia or worse, "racism" going on is at best ignorant.
The fact is MS just got it so completely wrong with the original Xbox that they will probably never recover there. They paid absolutely no attention to the wants of Japanese gamers at first - they do have different tastes, and they have different wants and needs as far as the design of the console itself goes. The system was not what they wanted, the games were not what they wanted.
One thing about Japan is there is a lot of brand loyalty, and conversely a lot of brand avoidance. If a company gets a reputation, it is very hard to shake that reputation. The Xbox pretty quickly got a reputation as being big, ugly, unreliable (the scratched disc issue was a big story there), with bad games that nobody wanted to play. Despite the marketing for the 360, that reputation is going to be a very tough thing to overcome there. If you ask a gamer in Japan what they think of when they hear "Xbox", the most likely answer is going to be "kusoge" (I'll leave you to look that up).
Even ignoring that, though, I'm not convinced the Xbox 360 has overcome all of the original Xbox's issues. It is still big. It is still not styled the way the Japanese expect a console to be styled. (Painting the thing white does not automatically make it look like a Japanese product.) The PS3 has some issues too, but Sony's brand loyalty can overcome that. MS is not operating from that position of strength there so they really had to nail the design of the system, and they didn't. At least not for Japan, despite all their best efforts (including consulting with a Japanese design studio - who they seem to have totally ignored).
I have a feeling MS will get more than 2% of the market when all is said and done, as they really are making a push with developers there this time. But they will still be a very distant third, and I'm not sure the ROI is going to justify the effort and expense.
It's much like how journalism is an objective view of events.
This is typical of the mangled view of journalism many people seem to have these days...
Nobody ever said journalism was supposed to be objective. Journalism, in its purest form, is supposed to be factual and truthful. Is it objective to say that the Nazi's murdered 6 million jews and 6 million others they considered anti-Aryan? Do we necessarily have to get "their side of the story" on this? No - the fact is they did murder all those people, in gas chambers, in medical experiments, or simply by firing squad. There is no point in trying to present a "fair and balanced" account of this. It's not the journalist's job to present every point of view (think of what the word "journal" actually means); it's simply his job to present the horror that's happening in front of him, from his own perspective. We don't ask journalists to stop being human. The actual arguments in favor of or against what's been reported should be made in op-ed pieces that are labeled as such.
I just get annoyed when I see reports today that say things like "Study finds media gives Bush little positive coverage" - I mean, to me, that's an indication that he hasn't done anything to deserve positive coverage, not an indication of intentional bias. The job of the media isn't to simply spread things out evenly so that every single story gives equal weight to all viewpoints and arguments. The job of the media is just to report what's going on, from the perspective of the reporter and what they judge would be important to the reader. If bad things are happening, then bad things are happening. If somebody does something illegal or unethical, then it gets reported that way.
Similarly, a simulation (in the context of gaming) is not supposed to present "reality" in any more an unbiased way than we as humans perceive reality. I'm sure my cat perceives reality much differently than I do, but I'm not generally very interested in seeing everything in terms of when my next meal is or whether my owner wants to pet me. So by definition, you're accepting a certain perception of reality in your simulations as it is. Why do you draw the line at political or ethical considerations? Why does every simulation need to present the same watered-down, even-handed viewpoint?
If you find a simulation and you don't like the reality it's presenting, just buy a different one. The nice thing about all this is it means we have a choice, which we wouldn't if every simulation simply presented a completely "balanced" and unbiased reality - such a simulation would necessarily be basically utterly useless. It's the same thing as the old argument about the map that's so accurate that it's indistinguishable from the real thing, but utterly worthless because it is also the same size. If you want to play a simulation that simply presents a completely unbiased, accurate world, why not just open your eyes and go outside? It doesn't sound like you really want to be playing a game to begin with.
I'm being punished for being an early adopter; my HDTV has composit input only.
If somebody sold you an HDTV with nothing but a composite input, then I've got a bridge on the East River you might be interested in too.
As an employee of a major video games retailer, I can state that we sell far more PSP systems, games, and movies than we sell in DS. I don't have the actual numbers available here, but I'd wager it's almost a 10:1 ratio. Worldwide the DS might be on par with the PSP, but not in my local experience.
Well, the PSP is not even on sale in Europe yet, so obviously the DS outsells it there.
The DS is also currently outselling the PSP in Japan by a pretty significant margin (scroll down a bit), and is now ahead on total numbers there too, coming from behind earlier in the year.
I don't doubt that your individual store in the US sells more PSP's than DS's, but as others have pointed out, the DS is far more appealing to the casual Wal-Mart gaming crowd than the PSP is. It's possible that the PSP may outsell the DS at places like EB and GameStop while the DS destroys the PSP at department stores and discount centers. The latter would be a far greater retail presence. I haven't seen actual sales numbers for the US (US console sales numbers are always hard to come by), but I can almost guarantee the PSP is not outselling the DS by a "10:1 ratio" nationwide, and it would surprise me if the DS was not outselling the PSP just as it is in Japan.
If you go by Sony and Nintendo's own statements, then the DS is outselling the PSP worldwide by about 2:1 overall. Knowing the situation in Europe and Japan, you can basically deduce from that that things are at least roughly equal here in the US, and it's pretty likely that the DS is ahead.
The difference between AO vs. M is purely perception.
No, it is not. The ESRB has clear guidelines on when a title must be AO, with clear criteria for meeting that standard. Full frontal nudity, for example, is always supposed to be AO (partial nudity, including toplessness, is not necessarily AO unless it's during a sex scene). The ESRB doesn't publicize these criteria but I've attended several of their meetings on content ratings when I worked in the industry, and I've even still got a few of their guidelines packets lying around...
There'd be no reason to even have an AO rating if the difference was merely perception.
Because of these differences, most stores will not carry AO titles, in the same way most video stores do not carry X-rated DVD's. It's just more trouble than it's worth for the stores; they'd have to have a walled-off section for a very small selection of not-very-popular games, they'd have to deal with a lot of negative publicity and the constant threat of government action. (The industry itself deals with this anyway, but individual stores have no reason to want to get involved in it.)
I don't know if this mini-game would have caused SA to get an AO rating; unless there's nudity along with the sex, I really do doubt it. I've only seen a few screenshots and the ones I've seen have all had the characters fully clothed, just as they are in the rest of the game. I'm not sure "simulated" sex, which is what fully-clothed sex pretty much by definition is (whether performed by real people or digital characters) is enough to get the video game equivalent of an X rating.
Keita Takahashi's speech at the Game Developer's Conference was very interesting, to say the least, and I think more game developers would benefit from listening to what he has to say.
I read that, and I honestly don't think he said much, at least if the story you linked to really got to the essence of his point. From the story, his point seems to be that games aren't very important, that he isn't very good at creating them, and that Katamari Damacy only turned out the way it did because he couldn't figure out how to do what he really wanted to do. He even said simple isn't necessarily best, it's just all he knows how to do.
I don't really see how this helps anybody in the game industry.
His first argument is probably the only one that carries any weight, although it's also the one most likely to be ignored. Game creators do have a sense of self-importance that leads them to create these massively pompous epics that play more like work than games. I don't just mean RPG's, either; I mean almost all games today. If more game creators would take the attitude that what they're doing doesn't really matter, I honestly think we'd get some better games.
Unfortunately, human nature doesn't work that way - nobody wants to think that what they're doing is irrelevant.
If what you took from his speech is that games should be more simple and accessible, well, he pretty much said exactly the opposite. I'd look more to a guy like Shigeru Miyamoto for that sentiment, although he hasn't really been backing up his words with his games lately, and anyway the public seems to be moving in a different direction.
KD at least proved that there is still a market for a really good, innovative, different type of game that's played strictly for the fun of it rather than trying to wow with graphics or create some sort of community of grind addicts online. Unfortunately, I don't see a mad rush of developers trying to emulate what KD did - all I see in the pipeline is a continuing and seemingly endless stream of GTA, Halo, and Everquest clones.