I'm a bit bewildered by how we got from the figures in the article to the conclusion that "the Japanese aren't interested in online gaming".
When you couple the results of the survey with the sales results of online games in Japan, I don't think it's a real stretch.
Final Fantasy XI has a huge Japanese player base, despite broadband being pretty much essential for it.
People keep saying this. What huge player base? FFXI sold 180,000 copies in Japan. As a percentage of the population, this is similar to the 400,000 player base of EQ in the US, but as a percentage of average FF sales over the past 10 years, it's miniscule. I don't think a numbered FF game on a major console has ever sold fewer than 1 million units in Japan, going back to FF1 on the Famicom.
FFXI is considered a dismal failure in Japan, as others have pointed out whenever someone else brings up the "huge userbase". It's not something Square is considering doing again anytime soon.
Second, while the PSX is damn expensive, it's actually not poorly priced for Japan. Sure, you can get a Tivo for a lot cheaper in America, but there is no Tivo in Japan. The average hard disk TV recorder thingy starts at $500 and goes up here, so the PSX is about the price of buying a PS2 and a hard disk recorder anyway, if not a bit cheaper.
I think the point is even a $500 hard disk recorder is a niche product in Japan - these things just aren't as popular as they are here - so the added expense of the PSX there just makes it even more unpopular. And if it's unpopular in Japan, it'll be even less popular here, where DVR's are even cheaper.
It just seems like a pretty poorly-conceived device all-around. It's not particularly appealing in either country - in Japan because DVR's are not that big to begin with, and in the US because other DVR's are so much cheaper.
I think the interesting thing here is NOT that the games may or may not be as good as a "commercial" release, so much as people are not content to be passive consumers of entertainment. I taught painting for years, and though not all of my students were great painters, at least they were willing to engage in a creative act. And so it is with homebrew games. I think it is great people are writing their own games, good, bad or indifferent.
Well, not to sound like I'm in favor of stifling creativity or anything, but I don't. We have a real problem with the signal to noise ratio in the video game industry already; I don't really see what the point is in making it worse just so people who aren't particularly creative can feel like they are.
I am not saying that nobody who doesn't work for a game company should write games. I'm saying whether or not you believe games are "art", there's no disputing that they are a creative media, and making them requires more than just technical chops, and more than just a high concept (in this case, the dubious concept of producing games for obsolete systems). If someone is truly creative, the system will naturally encourage them and they will be successful. If someone is not creative, they really need to be told that so they don't continue wasting their (and our) time.
There is this assumption on/., which I attribute to the general libertarian/anti-authority viewpoint that generally gets expressed here, that commercial game publishers and developers do not know what they're doing, and that the true creativity lies "out there" somewhere, undiscovered. Well, in most cases, that's not true. The industry right now definitely has its share of problems, but there's no lack of creative people working in the industry, and the best generally do rise to the top. It's just that many of them lose their idealism eventually working under strict corporate structures; they become order-takers. This is a real problem, but the solution is not to put even less creative people in their places, or to start accepting mediocrity from the outside as a substitute. The solution is to fix the problem within the commercial industry itself, and to encourage the creativity that's already there to come out more often than it does now.
Ever since technology became accessible to so many, there's been this idea that it would open up this vast untapped creativity throughout the world - we'd have countless new filmmakers, music-makers, game makers. Well, my feeling is (as someone who's worked in various creative industries) that the most creative people are already working in their respective industries, and that the signal/noise ratio for those sitting at home with a camcorder or a mixing program or a game machine emulator and a scripting language will be even lower than it is for those in the professional industries. Not higher, as has been the conventional wisdom to this point (and seems to still be, on this site).
In other words, if these guys were really any good, they'd probably already have jobs in the industry. I know that's not a popular view around here, but then most of the people on this site have never worked in the game industry (or the film industry, or whatever), so they don't really know the quality of the people in that industry.
A simple "No, thanks" unfortunately doesn't work. Like I said in my parent post, if I had said "No thanks" and they walked away, I'd be fine with it. But I had to quite literally tell each employee three times that I wasn't going to buy it. It wasn't until I said "well, I'll think about it" or "I want to cancel my sale" did I get any response from the clerks.
Maybe that was your problem - wanting a response from the clerks. I see no reason why you had to even talk to a single one of them if you knew what you were buying and were able to pick it up yourself. Here was my last experience at Best Buy:
1. Walk in, head for the DVD player aisle. 2. Pick up DVD player box (I knew the model I wanted, and I knew they had it from the web site). 3. First salesperson: "sir, are you purchasing that? Would you like to hear about our service plan?" My response: "Not interested" and walk away. 4. Walk towards the cash register. Second salesperson, basically the same question. Same response, and same walk away. 5. Hit cash register. Pay for item. Leave.
The time before that, I bought a cell phone for my wife and actually had to deal with a salesperson, since they don't just leave them out. They also asked me about three times for the service plan and my reaction each time was "not interested". I ended up walking out with my phone with no more inconvenience than the 3 extra seconds it took me to say "not interested" 3 times.
I've come to expect the service plan pitch anywhere I go these days. You just have to know how to deal with it. Sure, it would be nice if BB didn't push it so hard, but you know what? It's their store, and they're free to offer you whatever the hell they want to. It's up to you how you decide to handle it. You can get all huffy and annoyed and get into a big lengthy conversation with the salespeople and their manager and do nothing but waste everybody's time and cause yourself even greater aggravation, or you can just say "no" and shut up. There's not much they can say in response to that. I liken it to dealing with telemarketers - their whole strategy is based on not allowing you time to talk, and making you feel guilty for saying no. But if you interrupt them mid-pitch and say "no, I am not interested" or worse for them, simply hang up, there is absolutely nothing they can do about it.
And if they do continue to press, just ignore them. The most I would ever say would be something like "look, are you going to sell me this TV or not?" And if they then persisted with the service plan, I'd just walk out. They're not the only store around and there's no reason to get so up-in-arms about the situation. If they're more interested in selling a service plan than the merchandise it covers, just take your business elsewhere. Just don't let them get to you, because it's not going to help you get your merchandise any faster. It's only going to cause you unneeded aggravation.
There were no other viable game systems during the glory days of NES.
Depends what you mean by "viable", I guess... If you mean profitable, there was also the PC Engine, which was quite popular in Japan and profitable for NEC. There was also the Sega Master System/Mark III, though that might be stretching the term "viable", I guess. It was still a major system by a major manufacturer. The Atari 7800 was also released during the reign of the NES, though it's in the same boat as the Master System.
The poster you're replying to said he loved all the systems from that period... you're implying there were no other systems during that period, but there sure were. "Viable" is arguable I guess, but the PC Engine was certainly viable, and the others were definitely playable and fun even if not profitable, and they certainly did exist, at the very least.
The introduction of the NES marked the end of the classic video game period.
Most who lived through it would argue that the crash of 1984 marked the end of the classic video game period. The introduction of the NES marked the beginning of the modern video game period.
It's a small distinction, I guess, but the game industry in this country was dead for a year before the release of the NES. The NES itself didn't end anything, it began a new era. The end of the classic era had already come and gone, though, with the near-simultaneous exit from the market of Coleco, Mattel and Atari.
When I was younger, that year in 1984 seemed like an eternity. There was no home video game system on the market in the US just prior to the launch of the NES. That seems unbelievable now, and it seemed unbelievable then too, as there has always been a game system on the market since 1972, except for that one year. Most of us thought video game consoles had been a passing fad, and that fad was now over, and we'd never see another one again.
What planet are you from? Nintendo monopolized the game industry in the late 80s like Microsoft can't to this day. It took the combined efforts of Atari Corp. and Atari Games Corp/Tengen through the court system to get Nintendo to drop their licensing agreements that stated that if any 3rd party developer made a title on the NES, it could not be ported to any other competing system.
You don't quite have your facts straight on this. Nintendo had exclusivity deals with various third parties just as they (and Sony, and MS) do now. That has not, nor will it ever, change. What Atari sued Nintendo over was their "seal of quality" program, in which Nintendo would not legally allow third parties to develop software for their system without their permission. Atari basically did not want to pay Nintendo's licensing fees and thought this amounted to a monopolistic business practice. The reason for the program from Nintendo's view was obvious, though: it was a direct response to the American game crash of 1984, which was partly caused by a glut of unlicensed, poor quality games on the market. In fact, Atari lost that lawsuit, and Nintendo won the lawsuit they later filed against Tengen. Otherwise the entire video game industry would not exist as it does today - there would be no reason for any company to make game hardware.
Whether or not you agree with the policy, Atari is hardly the good guy you're making them out to be. Remember that it was Atari who first sued Activision for developing games for the 2600 - Atari didn't think third parties even had a right to exist, licensed or not. By the time of the NES, Atari was on the ropes and out of desperation formed Tengen so they could play both sides of the fence - develop for their own systems under the Atari name and for competitors as Tengen.
Remember also that Tengen illegally released their own version of Tetris for the NES, which was subsequently pulled from the market and damages awarded to Nintendo, who owned the copyright for home console systems.
That policy hurt not only the Atari 7800, but the Sega Master System and the NEC TurboGrafx16 (T16). During that era, the Japanese version of the T16 known as the PC Engine, was the dominant system because every title was available on it. NEC brought the system to America only to find out they couldn't release hardly any of the games it enjoyed in Japan to Stateside. The Sega Genesis did not have a large amount of support from 3rd party developers either; Tengen was one of the strongest (and prominent) because they had an axe to grind with "The Other" Beast of Redmond.
This is completely, completely wrong. First of all, the PC Engine was never the "dominant system". It was more popular than it was here, but it was always second to the Famicom/Super Famicom. Second, NEC's problems in this country were of their own making, not Nintendo's - there was nothing preventing them from releasing many of their most popular games here, they just chose not to. Same goes for Sega. It's true that many of the third party games released in Japan were never released here, but that's true now of the PS2 and GameCube as well - we're just not that big into dating sims, hentai games and other genres that are all the rage over there. It's got nothing to do with licensing. And it sure doesn't explain why NEC and Sega didn't bring some of their own most popular first party titles over here - it was simply ineptitude on the parts of these manufacturers.
And lastly, Tengen was never as big as you seem to think they were, and they were only in business for a short time before their legal issues shut them down (the licensing issue went back and forth in the courts for a while before Nintendo prevailed). Some of their games were quality games but they were always a second-tier publisher, similar to a company like THQ today (which Sega uses to release a lot of their games on other systems, similar to how Atari used Tengen).
This might be plausible if Japan were actually in a recession. It is not.
Japan's Recession(Which basically amounts to stagflation) has been going on for 10 years
Two big problems with this sentence. First, recession is not "stagflation". That is not what a recession is. A recession is two or more consecutive quarters of negative growth. Japan has had several recessions in the last ten years; the US has had one, but it's not unusual for us to have several recessions in a ten year period either. It's not unusual for any part of the world, actually.
Second, even if Japan was in recession for 10 years, that still doesn't explain why game sales peaked in 1997 (less than ten years ago) and have declined a massive 40% since then. Typically, in recession, consumer spending is part of the cause, it's not a trailing indicator (though it can be; it was in the most recent US recession). And a 40% decline is extreme; a 40% decline across all industries would be an extremely severe economic depression, far worse than even the Great Depression in the US in the 1930's. You cannot explain away a 40% decline with a simple recession; even an industry reliant on disposable income. (Explain why Hollywood movie ticket sales in Japan have increased over the same period, for example.)
Here in the US, we had fairly mild down-turn which is already reversing itself.
Here in the US, we had a recession. By definition. Japan doesn't have recessions while we have "down-turns". A recession is a recession.
As for what is the difference between the US and Japan video game markets, there is not nearly as big a difference as some make it out to be. I say this both as someone who worked in the game industry until about 2 months ago and someone with a set of Japanese in-laws (and you can read into that that I shuttle back and forth between countries fairly often - in fact I just got back to the US from my latest trip earlier today).
You can mark my words, what's happening in Japan will happen here. Maybe not to the same extent, but the natural life cycle of the current game systems is expiring, which in itself is generally good for a 10-20% yearly decline after a system's been on the market for four or more years. In Japan, that's combined with a general malaise about the current state of gaming - casual gamers have become turned off by the more modern and complex games, hardcore gamers have been turned off by what they see as a lack of recent innovation. The US has always (well, since the 1980's) followed the Japanese market by a couple years, and I see a lot of the same things happening now to the US market as happened in Japan in the late 1990's.
Will we have a 40% decline in the games market? I think that's unlikely, unless all these forces converge in exactly the same way as in Japan (again, unlikely, just due to the laws of randomness). But I could see a 15-25% drop in the overall industry over the next two or three years, easily. Enough to make developers stand up and take notice, that's for sure. And it could be bigger than that.
The crash of 1984 was brought on partially due to a glut of games and systems on the market; too much overhead, too many production lines, not enough consumers. Well, in the next two years, we will likely have the PS2, Xbox, GameCube, GBA SP, GBA DS, PSP, PS3, Xbox 2, and the Nintendo "Revolution" all on the market at the same time, at least for a year or so. If that's not a glut, and a recipe for disaster, then I don't know what is. I think I'm being conservative in predicting a 15-25% decline in the market.
And no, I don't think that the DMCA is a good idea, I'm just trying to correct a common legal fallacy that I've see repeated many times on slashdot.
It's not a fallacy. US Copyright law specifically says "it's ok for you to make copies under circumstances including this, and this, and some other stuff". Case law supports making backup copies as fair use under that law.
Now another law comes along and says "well, whether or not you're allowed to make copies, you're not allowed to make copies by getting around this thing we put in place to stop you from making copies." This is like saying you bought a car, and yes, you own the car and are legally allowed to drive it, but you're not legally allowed to open the door to get into it. It doesn't make any sense, and one law is clearly designed to contradict the other, even if it doesn't do so specifically or by actually retracting any part of the original law. It's a sneaky way of taking away rights you were specifically granted by legislation and then case law.
So I realize that you're not arguing in favor of the DMCA, but it sounds like that's because you're morally opposed to it, not because you think there's any legal problem with it. There are legal problems with it, in as much as it basically retracts portions of copyright law in practice without doing so specifically. If you ask me, congress got hoodwinked on this - I don't think they meant to pass a law retracting portions of copyright law as they pertain to digital media, but the RIAA and MPAA told them the law was good and congress believed them. I think most members of congress probably honestly believed they were simply adding to and clarifying copyright law as it pertains to digital media. But that's not what they did; the DMCA by nature cannot be applied fairly (since it only applies to digital media - an artist holding a copyright on a painting, for example, can't invoke it), and it so far has only really been invoked in this one specific way in lawsuits, which is in the restrictions it places on fair use rights defined elsewhere in copyright law.
The dude is selling this for $100,000 starting price. That's pretty insane. Unless you're a store wanting to resell this in a 3rd world country (even then, it'll be hard), you're not going to make your money back.
Yeah, a third world country like the USA...
There are a lot of import and collector's shops in this country. Most of them that I've been to are lucky to have one of the items on this list, and it'd usually be the showcase item in the store. I mean come on, a Dreamcast dev kit? Any store I know of would die to get their hands on one of those, and they'd slap a nice $1,000 price tag on it alone, easy.
In fact, this is obviously a HK retailer or wholesaler looking to dump a lot of stock quickly. It's not a collector, it's a guy who sells games for a living one way or another (he may not have an English web site or any US contacts; maybe this is the most convenient way for him to sell here). Look at his other auctions; no way he's got new, unopened copies of games (and systems) lying around because he's a collector. I collect games; this is not a game collector's collection, this is a game seller's collection.
That said, some of this stuff would get him into a lot of trouble if some of these companies found out he was selling it. I'm not sure if Ebay's going to let this auction go through to the end; dev kits, in particular, are mucho taboo to sell, though the older ones he could probably get away with. Nothing recent, though.
I will admit I'd give my left arm for this collection. If I had $100,000 to spare, I'd bid.
I just pull a hardback book off the shelf and use that. A half-inch thick book can absorb a fair amount of heat before it starts to get through and being a hardback, the laptop feet provide as much spacing as if it was flat on a desk.
I would honestly think the best possible solution would just be a hard, flat piece of plastic covered with some hard foam. The most important thing is not to restrict air flow from your fans, and the whole reason your laptop gets hot in your lap is that your legs are restricting that air flow. Personally, my laptop does not even get warm if it's sitting on a table with unrestricted airflow, so duplicating that surface while adding a little bit of heat absorbant material would probably be the best solution.
Reflecting heat back into the machine seems to me the worst possible solution. If I wanted something to do that I'd just put a towel or something between me and my laptop. This is not a solution to anything; all it will do is kill my laptop pretty quickly.
But you know what? This is just a general comment, but I've got a P4-M 2.4 laptop and the thing barely gets warm even with restricted airflow. People need to demand better thermal designs in their laptops. I always see people complaining about laptop heat, but it's like seeing people complaining about popups as a Firefox user - I don't even realize it's a problem until someone brings it up. Centrino laptops shouldn't really get warm at all, P4-M laptops should just barely get warm, and other Intel chips really don't belong in laptops to begin with (I don't really know anything about AMD's mobile chips, but I imagine they have similar thermal properties). It's all about the case and fan design. Devices such as the one in this article really have no reason to exist other than poor choices by the laptop manufacturer.
I'm a little annoyed by the attitude here. This is a pretty impressive reverse engineering job, but most of Slashdot is just laughing it off because the device was originally created for Pokemon related games.
I think the point is, what is the point? Ok, so you hacked a little low-power, low-resolution LCD mini-game device. Now what are you going to do with your newfound knowledge? Create other obsolete games that could be done better on other systems that have already been reverse-engineered themselves? I mean, why even bother?
There are a lot of stories about hacking for hacking's sake that show up on Slashdot; most of them I just shrug off and don't even bother reading, because they're really just irrelevant. But I do read the games-related ones, because it's my field, and it just seems like such a major waste of time whenever I see something like this.
I mean, ok, it's a hobby. That's cool; I have a lot of meaningless hobbies too, some of which are tech-related. I'm not saying these guys shouldn't do this; if they want to, good for them. But I'm not self-centered enough to believe my hobbies belong on a tech news site; I mean seriously, in what possible way could this affect more than literally one or two people who read this site and even actually own a Pokemon Mini?
Any news site/organization/whatever has to do some filtering of the stories it puts up, with a nod towards relevance to readers. Obviously, some stories are just in that weird/dumb category and you put them up for a sort of shock value. But that's all this is; there's no real practical application for this, and it's not worthy of being called an "impressive reverse engineering job" precisely because there was no real reason for this thing to be reverse engineered in the first place. Anything can be reverse engineered given enough time and effort, but not everything really needs to be.
Doesn't it look like one locked down device has usurped another ?
I'm guessing you mean the iPod is a locked-down device too. But it isn't. It'll play non-DRM'd mp3's just as well as it'll play AAC files, which Sony players won't. Personally, *no one* I know plays anything but regular old mp3's on their iPod. I'm sure there are people out there that do use it for Apple AAC, but I would think those people are in the clear minority. People don't call the iPod and others of its ilk "mp3 players" for nothing. This is a clear fact that Sony and the rest of the RIAA (and don't forget, Sony *is* a member of the RIAA) don't seem to grasp. The iPod is a success because it plays mp3's. If it didn't, it would have failed. And mp3's are as popular as they are because they can be easily copied and traded, whatever the legality of it. It's as simple as that - if a hardware company wants a music device to succeed, it must support the standard mp3 format, which is what most everyone has the vast majority of their music in to begin with, and not for nothing either.
Sony really has no such thing as an mp3 player - even their upcoming iPod competitor converts mp3's to ATRAC as you copy them over, from what I've read. It's an ATRAC player just like all their other digital music players (other than CD players, which are a dying market). Honestly, I half believe that the true nature of the PSP - which is considered a gaming device right now - is as a media player designed to popularize Sony Connect. It won't work, but I do believe that's the plan, to sort of sneak in there and make music a value-added feature of this device they expect to be popular for other reasons. And of course that music will be in the ATRAC format.
Anyway, the RIAA is really smoking crack if they think people are going to have anything to do with fingerprinting to get their music. It almost reminds me of that Seinfeld episode where David Dinkins proposed a law requiring all New Yorkers to wear name tags all the time. I mean it's about that dumb. It's not even that it won't work (which it won't), it's that NO ONE will buy such a system, even if it means they don't get to listen to any new music. There's plenty of good music around already to listen to - more than I'd ever have time for in my life, that's for sure.
Wouldn't that be a movie written, directed, post-produced, and distributed by bots?
A good, semi-serious observation that brings me to the point I initially thought when I read the headline...
What about many of the avant-garde films of the 1960's, some of which did not feature traditionally "filmed" subjects at all (some of them literally just had objects pressed between the celluloid layers of film, giving a kaleidescope effect when the film was run). And what about animation? Not all animation features voices at all (witness old Road Runner cartoons) - are they not "completely artificial", at least in the same sense that the film in question here is? Does the medium itself (film vs. digital) make a difference, and if so, what if you simply digitized those old RR cartoons?
Like you, I would say that none of these films - including the one in this story - are artificial. They were all created by humans, and as long as humans are creating them there's nothing artificial about them, and to me, nothing particularly interesting either (at least not as far as the novelty; the film itself may be interesting, I don't know).
What I will find amazing is when we can apply the turing test to films - when a computer can literally write, direct, "shoot", edit, act, and do everything else itself, with no input from the humans. Even if humans programmed the applications that do it, that would still be quite an amazing feat. It would be still more amazing if these apps could then self-adapt to make better films, but then you're into talking about Matrix-like stuff:)
FLCL was 2000 and 2001 - the series ended at the end of March 2001.
Lain and Cowboy Bebop were 1998.
Cowboy Bebop *started* in 1998. The series ended in 1999; the movie was produced in 2001.
Lain is the only one you've got me on.
And IMO, Spirited Away is in Miyazaki's top percentile of films - a lot of people didn't quite get it, if you ask me. I ask people here what they think it was about and they're usually not close. Maybe it's a cultural thing.
>And WHO needs MS mediaplayers anyhow... Have any pointers to alternatives ?
Plenty of alternatives exist, it depends on what you want to do. I think the idea that anyone would use one "media player" for everything is just stupid - at least when it's a company out for its own interest releasing the player (as opposed to, say, an open-source free software project designed to collate as many formats as possible into one application).
I would never use an MS media player to rip anything. I use EAC/LAME for that.
I would never use an MS media player to play back mp3's. I use iTunes for that, and it works great - so well, in fact, that apart from needed performance tweaks I doubt Apple or anyone else will ever be able to release a better player for this purpose.
I would never use an MS media player to play back QuickTime files - in fact you can't use it for this, as far as I know of. I use QuickTime to play its native format.
I would never use an MS media player to play DVD's. I use WinDVD for that, and it has a lot more DVD playback options than WMP - it's not even close. There is absolutely nothing WMP offers over any of the standalone DVD player apps out there.
In fact, really the *only* thing I would use WMP for is to play back Windows Media files. And I do use Windows Media whenever I do video capture, partly because the Windows Media 9 codec is a nice codec that supports ultra-high resolution as well as 5.1 surround sound, and also because MS gives away a very nice little free video capture and encoder utility called Windows Media Encoder. This is an example where MS is actually providing me something of value, and so I use it.
So I'm not seeing WMP is useless, just that it can never be a jack-of-all-trades, especially with this "DRM 10" built into it (DRM 10? There have been 9 other versions of this?). There is no such thing as a "media player" as far as I'm concerned (I never got mplayer to play all the formats I wanted in Linux either!); there are only mp3 players, DVD players, "windows media" players, Real players, QuickTime players, etc. Each player with its own native format; it's own specialization that it does best, and that gives you the most freedom to use your media as you see fit. All of these companies want to monopolize your media, and you'd be stupid to give up that control to them.
Oh, I also just find it really silly that everyone is now building "media players" to act as web browsers - but only to their online music store addresses! This isn't "integration", this is just a stupid web page rendered in the player window! I can navigate with my own damn browser, thank you - this is another function that media players just should not have.
(yes, I've disabled the music store in iTunes - no way I'd pay 99 cents for a DRM-encrusted song anyway.)
Then you haven't seen Lain, FLCL, Spirited Away, Cowboy Bebop, or any number of other series I could name.
I always see this criticism that "anime sucks" now, that it was better in the good old days. Well, as with most things, there really was no "good old days" and you're probably just remembering anime as you first encountered it, when it was new and different to you. But anime itself is not very old (the 1950's, really, was the start of it), it generally wasn't really much better than the level of American Saturday morning cartoons until at least the mid 1980's (and even then the good stuff was mostly confined to guys like Miyazaki and Leiji Matsumoto), and it's actually diversified since then. Yes, there's a lot of crap, but there was *always* a lot of crap... there's also some good stuff too these days, in a variety of styles that didn't even exist a decade or so ago.
It's true, though, that the money has run out on a lot of studios, and it shows in many cases. Series are shorter than they used to be - there are fewer long-running TV series now, and OVA's (straight-to-video releases) now usually run just a few episodes. But a series like FLCL demonstrates just how much you can do with a short series and not much money - it's a brilliant satire/parody of anime cliches, and one of the most energetic, fun, funny, and in the end seriously well-written series I've ever seen. As in, actually somewhat profound.
I don't necessarily think financial hard times are always a bad thing in art and entertainment. The appetite for anime in Japan is insatiable - it's everywhere, and it's not dying anytime soon. If producers are forced to work on shoestring budgets with compacted storylines, maybe they'll focus a bit more on plot, character, and *interesting* animation rather than just overblown Hollywood-style productions. FLCL showed the way, we'll see if others can pick up where it left off.
Ditching the white earphones was a good first step - I would also suggest not using a fancy case to carry around your laptop - those leather targus bags just scream "look at me! expensive stuff here!"
I would suggest not even using a bag that's *shaped* like a laptop. Use a backpack or something, that has a padded laptop area. Make sure you "rough up" the bag a bit ahead of time (just throw it around against some rocks or something, or the pavement). As with any bag in the city, never let it out of your hand. But if it's not obvious you're even carrying a laptop to begin with, people will be less inclined to want to steal it.
I have an oversized army jacket that I use for when I want to carry gadgets around without a bag. I can easily fit my PDA in there, a small digital camera, or an iPod, all without any bulge. I'm not big on those jackets made specifically for carrying gadgets around, because I mean, come on. If it's a jacket made specifically for carrying gadgets around, it's going to be obvious to any criminal that that's why you have it!
...it's a work in progress. Of course, it could be argued that all of Linux-dom is a work-in-progress as well. So that makes the statement rather silly I suppose.
But posting a review of an on-going project and damning it is somewhat inappropriate if only because it is unconstructive.
If it were a review of a closed-source commercial project, it is more understandable as these projects aren't truly considered on-going since each version of a given product is usually considered stand-alone with the exception of bug fixes.
I think you're missing the point, which is that this way of thinking is the entire problem. It's no excuse to say "it's a work in progress, as is all of Linux". People need to get away from this idea if Linux is expected to go anywhere. At some point, people actually need to be able to start *using* Linux, not tinkering and fixing things all the time. And as long as simple and basic problems like this exist in major distributions, that's not going to happen.
I have been a Red Hat user for a long time (I was a Mandrake user before that). I installed FC1 when it was released, once Red Hat stopped producing regular Red Hat for all types of users. I didn't really have any major problems with it; just the standard Linux annoyances along with FC's well-known inability to play MP3's out of the box. But I won't install FC2. I'm not about to try to repair my boot partition, or manually partition things myself. I don't run an OS for the purpose of putzing around and fixing things all the time; I run an OS for the purpose of using my computer.
I'm not really sure where to turn, as one of the great things about FC is apt-get support, and that's not universal among all distro's. I guess I will have to check out Debian (apt's native distro), although I'm not sure if it's as polished as FC is in terms of user interface (I actually like Bluecurve). There is still no distro that has everything; ease of use, polished interface, stability, speed. I had hoped FC would be it, but it isn't. I realize it's supposed to be Red Hat's "cutting edge" version of Linux, but I didn't expect that meant it would ship with show-stopper bugs like this.
Actually, the extrapolation procedure doesn't work too bad. It's just a matter of connecting the dots. I have a book from 20+ years ago about the future of video games. Some of the claims were:
* Games could allow more than two players. Perhaps even enough to play a full game of soccer or football! (The picture showed a "dome" with controls in a ring around it.)
* Games will be able to be played over great distances! (The picture showed a chess board with a wireless antenna on it.)
* Games will be so much more realistic! (Shows a handheld game with a full scene of a motor bike jumping a dirt ramp.)
It's no stretch to think that in the future, graphics will be better, and different types of games will be possible with more computing power. But statements like the following have really becoome a pet peeve of mine:
Computer games in 2034 are likely to offer simulated worlds and interactive storytelling that's more engaging than linear presentations such as those in most movies today.
News flash: people *like* linear presentations and plotlines. We don't have linear presentations in games right now because of any technical limitation in the medium, we have them because that's what people *want*. Case in point: the Final Fantasy series. FFXI - the first MMORPG in the series - has sold fewer than 700,000 copies worldwide on both the PC and PS2. FFX - the last truly linear game in the series - sold 5 *million* copies on *one* system. FFX-2 was offline but also not linear, and it was criticized by some as a result and did not sell as well as FFX. Part of the reason people buy games in this series is *because* of the linear story-telling in them.
There will be a market for both types of games in the future, as there is now. I'm not saying linear games are all the market has room for. But we've had linear presentations in various mediums going back *thousands* of years; it's a method of storytelling that's been perfected by many skilled artisans. Can you imagine Shakespeare as a choose-your-own-adventure? Our human desire for linear stories goes much deeper than simple technical limitations; such stories are present in all cultures and have been basically since man learned to communicate.
There's nothing "more engaging" about persistent worlds; in fact they've already become passe, with most MMORPG's just copying each other. It's just a different style of gameplay, which has yet to reach maturity. Someday it will, but there is nothing inherently superior about that method of gameplay, just as there is nothing inherently superior in sports games vs. RPG's or in fighting games vs. platformers. They're just different genres.
I don't have any problem with extrapolation to predict the future in computing, because most of that extrapolation is born of the assumption that processors will continue to get faster, and applications more complex. I think that's a safe assumption to make. But I do have problems with expectations of fundamental shifts in the way humans have enjoyed their leisure time for centuries just because a faster CPU enables them to. It's not up to consumers to fit their interests around their PC's; it's up to hardware manufacturers and application designers to fit their products to consumers' interests.
Re:*Disney* came out ahead when they dumped Pixar
on
Welcome To Planet Pixar
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· Score: 5, Interesting
By letting Pixar go, Disney doesn't GAIN anything they weren't already entitled to under the old contract. But, as you point out, they're not losing anything either.
Well, not technically. But they "lost" all of the future revenue they would have had from future Pixar films. They lost the *potential* for revenue from future films, which is what companies are based on after all - revenue potential, not current revenue. A company with no future is not a company for very long, pretty much by definition.
So Disney did give up a lot, quite a lot. I really doubt Pixar will keep up this run of massive hits forever, but assuming they even put up half the gross over the next five movies, that's still $1.25 billion in gross Disney just threw away.
Was Disney put in an impossible position by Pixar's demands? I don't think so. Pixar had become Disney's animation business and they knew it. Disney's in-house animation has stunk up the business for years and it's only getting worse - that's of Disney's own doing. It was Disney's mis-management that put Pixar in the position they were in, where they could make such demands, and in my opinion Disney was in no position to refuse them, even as unreasonable as they sounded.
If you run an ice cream stand, it's not you or your stand that people are coming for, it's the ice cream you're selling. And you need to get that ice cream from somewhere, whether it's by making it yourself or by buying it from someone else. Without ice cream people want to buy, you may as well not have an ice cream stand, right?
The question is, does Disney want to be in the animation business or not? Letting Pixar go suggests to me that they don't - otherwise, there's really no price that would have been too high to pay. This was their source of ice cream. Without Pixar, there is no animation business at Disney anymore, and they need to rely even more on their theme parks (which are nothing without their animation business) and ABC. Eventually, the theme parks cannot really survive without the animation, as it's all based on Disney's "branding".
I don't usually like to sound too dramatic about these things, as most companies can survive events like this, but I really think Disney threw away their core business here, first by letting their own animation division fall apart, then by throwing away their only remaining source of reliable animation revenue. They no longer have anything they can really market as Disney animation with a straight face. (Personally, I think their Studio Ghibli contract has left them with some films better than either their own *or* anything Pixar has ever done, but they'll never use them to their potential - they're too hung-up on 3D right now). Without that animation, their theme parks decline, and then the whole company crumbles. Disney cannot survive just as ABC.
This was not a win for Disney. The deal Pixar wanted was not a very good one for Disney, but it was the lesser of two evils.
If you can play back Vorbis, then why would you care if your collection doesn't meet the most common standard? I bought an iHP-120 and I don't care if anybody else can listen to my tracks or not because I can hear them fine.
And what happens when 4 years from now your screen dies and it either a) costs more to fix it than to buy a new player, or b) there are no parts available anymore? Or what if you drop it and it breaks? So you have to buy a new player, and who knows what formats players will play by that time?
The only format that's guaranteed to be around, and will be the "default" format for all hardware players (except those made by Sony) - simply because so many people already have such a large collection built up - is MP3. I think this test is basically affirmation that even if all you care about is sound quality, it's still ok to use MP3 and get the best of all possible worlds - sound quality and compatibility.
MP3 was going to be around for many, many years anyway... but if it finally overcomes its undeserved reputation for being a "last-generation" codec with poor sound quality (an idea being promoted by the RIAA through their DRM partners at Apple and MS), it'll probably be around forever. This test proves MP3 is a fine codec for high fidelity and it also happens to be the most compatible and future-proof in the bargain.
on the legal way -> itunes is better on the illegal way -> even old mp3 (next to vorbis or aac) is better
Illegal?? How is ripping my own CD's to MP3 illegal?
I have ripped all of my CD's to 320k max VBR MP3's using LAME (with EAC as a front-end). There's nothing illegal about this, and based on this listening test I'm quite confident that all of my music sounds at least as good, and probably better (in some cases probably significantly better) than if I'd re-purchased those same songs through iTunes (or ripped them to 128k AAC). And I have max compatibility among devices, with no DRM.
If this test proved anything, it's that Apple's and MS's claims that their codecs sound better than MP3's recorded at twice the bitrate is a load of bunk. All the codecs are at least comparable at the same bitrate, but a few are a little bit better than the others. In the end, for me it comes down to compatibility. I have no idea if the next player I buy will be an iPod, so why would I want to tie myself down to that player, especially when other codecs sound just as good, bit for bit?
btw, I tried taking this test, and honestly, I gave up because most of the time I could not even tell which was the original and which was the compressed version of the song. In my opinion any of these codecs yields more than acceptable sound quality. I see in a few cases one or another codec was significantly worse than the others on specific tracks (I probably just didn't get that far) but in most cases the high scores here (in the high 4's for the most part) show that all of these codecs do a good job at producing compressions nearly indistinguishable from the original even at 128k. Given a higher bitrate, they'd do just that much better.
its been out for a year now, actually i think longer, how is this headline news, it seems more like a ad to me. now if the guy MADE them himself like i know a lot of people have and posted how, then i would be impressed
Not only has the damn thing been out for more than a year, there are already dozens of reviews posted, many from more reputable sources. As you can see, pretty easy to find them too.
I've just learned to expect that every day or so a story like this will slip through. It'd be one thing to announced that the trackball has actually shipped (something a lot of people have been waiting for for a long time!) - that'd be news, honestly. But a new review of their base controller that those who need already have? No, this is not news. I was disappointed when I clicked through; I thought this must be a new product.
I predict the phenonmenon of making ringtones out of the latest teen pop will fade quickly as more and more annoying idiots are beaten to death with their own phones. It's happened in isolated incidents before but now we'll have critical mass.
It's been going on in Japan for about the past decade (the pop ringtones, not the death beatings). It's not a fad there, and as we seem to latch on to their tech and ideas for using it about five years after they do, I have a feeling it's not going to be a fad here either.
In fact I've always wondered how the copyright issue works there in respect to this. I don't know of any music group that's raised a stink about it there, despite the fact that there are probably thousands (literally) of paid, officially sanctioned iMode sites where you can download whatever ringtones you want. Maybe their music industry is just a lot more relaxed than ours?
(The "paid" part of it is money going to NTT DoCoMo, just their standard fee for being part of the service; there's no extra tacked on for these sites that goes to the music industry.)
I still can't figure out how he keeps getting work.. He's all explosion and nothing else.. his best movie was Face-Off and even that had the most implausible story.
You have obviously never seen one of his Hong Kong movies. He perfected the "buddy movie", in that his movies were not just Lethal Weapon-style action flicks with one comedian playing off a straight man - they were always emotional, usually with the "buddies" actually being villain/hero playing against each other. "The Killer" is the example most people use of this, where both the hero and villain identify with each other and respect each other and both are out to "save" the same girl.
A lot of Hollywood directors took inspiration from him, but nobody has managed to copy his formula.
When he came to Hollywood (forced to by the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong, as much of the HK movie industry was), he no longer had full control over his films. He has never, to my knowledge (and I may be wrong on this at this point), been the sole writer on any of his American films as he was on his HK films (even if he's credited as such, I'm sure script doctors have gone through and "fixed" any scripts he has written). He has also had to work with more established Hollywood crew members, and powerful producers, so his films have much less of his own personal stamp on them.
To say his best movie is "Face Off" is pretty ridiculous. Go out and see "The Killer", "Hard Boiled", or "A Better Tomorrow" and then talk to me.
Personally, if you're going to count only his American films, I actually enjoyed Mission Impossible 2 quite a bit. It's still not on the level of humor, emotional attachment or style as his HK films, but it's very polished, exciting, better written and at least *more* stylish than his other American films. I believe that was the first film here where he at least had some major influence on the script, though he did not write it himself.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a bit bewildered by how we got from the figures in the article to the conclusion that "the Japanese aren't interested in online gaming".
When you couple the results of the survey with the sales results of online games in Japan, I don't think it's a real stretch.
Final Fantasy XI has a huge Japanese player base, despite broadband being pretty much essential for it.
People keep saying this. What huge player base? FFXI sold 180,000 copies in Japan. As a percentage of the population, this is similar to the 400,000 player base of EQ in the US, but as a percentage of average FF sales over the past 10 years, it's miniscule. I don't think a numbered FF game on a major console has ever sold fewer than 1 million units in Japan, going back to FF1 on the Famicom.
FFXI is considered a dismal failure in Japan, as others have pointed out whenever someone else brings up the "huge userbase". It's not something Square is considering doing again anytime soon.
Second, while the PSX is damn expensive, it's actually not poorly priced for Japan. Sure, you can get a Tivo for a lot cheaper in America, but there is no Tivo in Japan. The average hard disk TV recorder thingy starts at $500 and goes up here, so the PSX is about the price of buying a PS2 and a hard disk recorder anyway, if not a bit cheaper.
I think the point is even a $500 hard disk recorder is a niche product in Japan - these things just aren't as popular as they are here - so the added expense of the PSX there just makes it even more unpopular. And if it's unpopular in Japan, it'll be even less popular here, where DVR's are even cheaper.
It just seems like a pretty poorly-conceived device all-around. It's not particularly appealing in either country - in Japan because DVR's are not that big to begin with, and in the US because other DVR's are so much cheaper.
I think the interesting thing here is NOT that the games may or may not be as good as a "commercial" release, so much as people are not content to be passive consumers of entertainment. I taught painting for years, and though not all of my students were great painters, at least they were willing to engage in a creative act. And so it is with homebrew games. I think it is great people are writing their own games, good, bad or indifferent.
/., which I attribute to the general libertarian/anti-authority viewpoint that generally gets expressed here, that commercial game publishers and developers do not know what they're doing, and that the true creativity lies "out there" somewhere, undiscovered. Well, in most cases, that's not true. The industry right now definitely has its share of problems, but there's no lack of creative people working in the industry, and the best generally do rise to the top. It's just that many of them lose their idealism eventually working under strict corporate structures; they become order-takers. This is a real problem, but the solution is not to put even less creative people in their places, or to start accepting mediocrity from the outside as a substitute. The solution is to fix the problem within the commercial industry itself, and to encourage the creativity that's already there to come out more often than it does now.
Well, not to sound like I'm in favor of stifling creativity or anything, but I don't. We have a real problem with the signal to noise ratio in the video game industry already; I don't really see what the point is in making it worse just so people who aren't particularly creative can feel like they are.
I am not saying that nobody who doesn't work for a game company should write games. I'm saying whether or not you believe games are "art", there's no disputing that they are a creative media, and making them requires more than just technical chops, and more than just a high concept (in this case, the dubious concept of producing games for obsolete systems). If someone is truly creative, the system will naturally encourage them and they will be successful. If someone is not creative, they really need to be told that so they don't continue wasting their (and our) time.
There is this assumption on
Ever since technology became accessible to so many, there's been this idea that it would open up this vast untapped creativity throughout the world - we'd have countless new filmmakers, music-makers, game makers. Well, my feeling is (as someone who's worked in various creative industries) that the most creative people are already working in their respective industries, and that the signal/noise ratio for those sitting at home with a camcorder or a mixing program or a game machine emulator and a scripting language will be even lower than it is for those in the professional industries. Not higher, as has been the conventional wisdom to this point (and seems to still be, on this site).
In other words, if these guys were really any good, they'd probably already have jobs in the industry. I know that's not a popular view around here, but then most of the people on this site have never worked in the game industry (or the film industry, or whatever), so they don't really know the quality of the people in that industry.
A simple "No, thanks" unfortunately doesn't work. Like I said in my parent post, if I had said "No thanks" and they walked away, I'd be fine with it. But I had to quite literally tell each employee three times that I wasn't going to buy it. It wasn't until I said "well, I'll think about it" or "I want to cancel my sale" did I get any response from the clerks.
Maybe that was your problem - wanting a response from the clerks. I see no reason why you had to even talk to a single one of them if you knew what you were buying and were able to pick it up yourself. Here was my last experience at Best Buy:
1. Walk in, head for the DVD player aisle.
2. Pick up DVD player box (I knew the model I wanted, and I knew they had it from the web site).
3. First salesperson: "sir, are you purchasing that? Would you like to hear about our service plan?" My response: "Not interested" and walk away.
4. Walk towards the cash register. Second salesperson, basically the same question. Same response, and same walk away.
5. Hit cash register. Pay for item. Leave.
The time before that, I bought a cell phone for my wife and actually had to deal with a salesperson, since they don't just leave them out. They also asked me about three times for the service plan and my reaction each time was "not interested". I ended up walking out with my phone with no more inconvenience than the 3 extra seconds it took me to say "not interested" 3 times.
I've come to expect the service plan pitch anywhere I go these days. You just have to know how to deal with it. Sure, it would be nice if BB didn't push it so hard, but you know what? It's their store, and they're free to offer you whatever the hell they want to. It's up to you how you decide to handle it. You can get all huffy and annoyed and get into a big lengthy conversation with the salespeople and their manager and do nothing but waste everybody's time and cause yourself even greater aggravation, or you can just say "no" and shut up. There's not much they can say in response to that. I liken it to dealing with telemarketers - their whole strategy is based on not allowing you time to talk, and making you feel guilty for saying no. But if you interrupt them mid-pitch and say "no, I am not interested" or worse for them, simply hang up, there is absolutely nothing they can do about it.
And if they do continue to press, just ignore them. The most I would ever say would be something like "look, are you going to sell me this TV or not?" And if they then persisted with the service plan, I'd just walk out. They're not the only store around and there's no reason to get so up-in-arms about the situation. If they're more interested in selling a service plan than the merchandise it covers, just take your business elsewhere. Just don't let them get to you, because it's not going to help you get your merchandise any faster. It's only going to cause you unneeded aggravation.
There were no other viable game systems during the glory days of NES.
Depends what you mean by "viable", I guess... If you mean profitable, there was also the PC Engine, which was quite popular in Japan and profitable for NEC. There was also the Sega Master System/Mark III, though that might be stretching the term "viable", I guess. It was still a major system by a major manufacturer. The Atari 7800 was also released during the reign of the NES, though it's in the same boat as the Master System.
The poster you're replying to said he loved all the systems from that period... you're implying there were no other systems during that period, but there sure were. "Viable" is arguable I guess, but the PC Engine was certainly viable, and the others were definitely playable and fun even if not profitable, and they certainly did exist, at the very least.
The introduction of the NES marked the end of the classic video game period.
Most who lived through it would argue that the crash of 1984 marked the end of the classic video game period. The introduction of the NES marked the beginning of the modern video game period.
It's a small distinction, I guess, but the game industry in this country was dead for a year before the release of the NES. The NES itself didn't end anything, it began a new era. The end of the classic era had already come and gone, though, with the near-simultaneous exit from the market of Coleco, Mattel and Atari.
When I was younger, that year in 1984 seemed like an eternity. There was no home video game system on the market in the US just prior to the launch of the NES. That seems unbelievable now, and it seemed unbelievable then too, as there has always been a game system on the market since 1972, except for that one year. Most of us thought video game consoles had been a passing fad, and that fad was now over, and we'd never see another one again.
What planet are you from? Nintendo monopolized the game industry in the late 80s like Microsoft can't to this day. It took the combined efforts of Atari Corp. and Atari Games Corp/Tengen through the court system to get Nintendo to drop their licensing agreements that stated that if any 3rd party developer made a title on the NES, it could not be ported to any other competing system.
You don't quite have your facts straight on this. Nintendo had exclusivity deals with various third parties just as they (and Sony, and MS) do now. That has not, nor will it ever, change. What Atari sued Nintendo over was their "seal of quality" program, in which Nintendo would not legally allow third parties to develop software for their system without their permission. Atari basically did not want to pay Nintendo's licensing fees and thought this amounted to a monopolistic business practice. The reason for the program from Nintendo's view was obvious, though: it was a direct response to the American game crash of 1984, which was partly caused by a glut of unlicensed, poor quality games on the market. In fact, Atari lost that lawsuit, and Nintendo won the lawsuit they later filed against Tengen. Otherwise the entire video game industry would not exist as it does today - there would be no reason for any company to make game hardware.
Whether or not you agree with the policy, Atari is hardly the good guy you're making them out to be. Remember that it was Atari who first sued Activision for developing games for the 2600 - Atari didn't think third parties even had a right to exist, licensed or not. By the time of the NES, Atari was on the ropes and out of desperation formed Tengen so they could play both sides of the fence - develop for their own systems under the Atari name and for competitors as Tengen.
Remember also that Tengen illegally released their own version of Tetris for the NES, which was subsequently pulled from the market and damages awarded to Nintendo, who owned the copyright for home console systems.
That policy hurt not only the Atari 7800, but the Sega Master System and the NEC TurboGrafx16 (T16). During that era, the Japanese version of the T16 known as the PC Engine, was the dominant system because every title was available on it. NEC brought the system to America only to find out they couldn't release hardly any of the games it enjoyed in Japan to Stateside. The Sega Genesis did not have a large amount of support from 3rd party developers either; Tengen was one of the strongest (and prominent) because they had an axe to grind with "The Other" Beast of Redmond.
This is completely, completely wrong. First of all, the PC Engine was never the "dominant system". It was more popular than it was here, but it was always second to the Famicom/Super Famicom. Second, NEC's problems in this country were of their own making, not Nintendo's - there was nothing preventing them from releasing many of their most popular games here, they just chose not to. Same goes for Sega. It's true that many of the third party games released in Japan were never released here, but that's true now of the PS2 and GameCube as well - we're just not that big into dating sims, hentai games and other genres that are all the rage over there. It's got nothing to do with licensing. And it sure doesn't explain why NEC and Sega didn't bring some of their own most popular first party titles over here - it was simply ineptitude on the parts of these manufacturers.
And lastly, Tengen was never as big as you seem to think they were, and they were only in business for a short time before their legal issues shut them down (the licensing issue went back and forth in the courts for a while before Nintendo prevailed). Some of their games were quality games but they were always a second-tier publisher, similar to a company like THQ today (which Sega uses to release a lot of their games on other systems, similar to how Atari used Tengen).
I'm not saying N
Clearly this is about the Japanese Recession.
This might be plausible if Japan were actually in a recession. It is not.
Japan's Recession(Which basically amounts to stagflation) has been going on for 10 years
Two big problems with this sentence. First, recession is not "stagflation". That is not what a recession is. A recession is two or more consecutive quarters of negative growth. Japan has had several recessions in the last ten years; the US has had one, but it's not unusual for us to have several recessions in a ten year period either. It's not unusual for any part of the world, actually.
Second, even if Japan was in recession for 10 years, that still doesn't explain why game sales peaked in 1997 (less than ten years ago) and have declined a massive 40% since then. Typically, in recession, consumer spending is part of the cause, it's not a trailing indicator (though it can be; it was in the most recent US recession). And a 40% decline is extreme; a 40% decline across all industries would be an extremely severe economic depression, far worse than even the Great Depression in the US in the 1930's. You cannot explain away a 40% decline with a simple recession; even an industry reliant on disposable income. (Explain why Hollywood movie ticket sales in Japan have increased over the same period, for example.)
Here in the US, we had fairly mild down-turn which is already reversing itself.
Here in the US, we had a recession. By definition. Japan doesn't have recessions while we have "down-turns". A recession is a recession.
As for what is the difference between the US and Japan video game markets, there is not nearly as big a difference as some make it out to be. I say this both as someone who worked in the game industry until about 2 months ago and someone with a set of Japanese in-laws (and you can read into that that I shuttle back and forth between countries fairly often - in fact I just got back to the US from my latest trip earlier today).
You can mark my words, what's happening in Japan will happen here. Maybe not to the same extent, but the natural life cycle of the current game systems is expiring, which in itself is generally good for a 10-20% yearly decline after a system's been on the market for four or more years. In Japan, that's combined with a general malaise about the current state of gaming - casual gamers have become turned off by the more modern and complex games, hardcore gamers have been turned off by what they see as a lack of recent innovation. The US has always (well, since the 1980's) followed the Japanese market by a couple years, and I see a lot of the same things happening now to the US market as happened in Japan in the late 1990's.
Will we have a 40% decline in the games market? I think that's unlikely, unless all these forces converge in exactly the same way as in Japan (again, unlikely, just due to the laws of randomness). But I could see a 15-25% drop in the overall industry over the next two or three years, easily. Enough to make developers stand up and take notice, that's for sure. And it could be bigger than that.
The crash of 1984 was brought on partially due to a glut of games and systems on the market; too much overhead, too many production lines, not enough consumers. Well, in the next two years, we will likely have the PS2, Xbox, GameCube, GBA SP, GBA DS, PSP, PS3, Xbox 2, and the Nintendo "Revolution" all on the market at the same time, at least for a year or so. If that's not a glut, and a recipe for disaster, then I don't know what is. I think I'm being conservative in predicting a 15-25% decline in the market.
And no, I don't think that the DMCA is a good idea, I'm just trying to correct a common legal fallacy that I've see repeated many times on slashdot.
It's not a fallacy. US Copyright law specifically says "it's ok for you to make copies under circumstances including this, and this, and some other stuff". Case law supports making backup copies as fair use under that law.
Now another law comes along and says "well, whether or not you're allowed to make copies, you're not allowed to make copies by getting around this thing we put in place to stop you from making copies." This is like saying you bought a car, and yes, you own the car and are legally allowed to drive it, but you're not legally allowed to open the door to get into it. It doesn't make any sense, and one law is clearly designed to contradict the other, even if it doesn't do so specifically or by actually retracting any part of the original law. It's a sneaky way of taking away rights you were specifically granted by legislation and then case law.
So I realize that you're not arguing in favor of the DMCA, but it sounds like that's because you're morally opposed to it, not because you think there's any legal problem with it. There are legal problems with it, in as much as it basically retracts portions of copyright law in practice without doing so specifically. If you ask me, congress got hoodwinked on this - I don't think they meant to pass a law retracting portions of copyright law as they pertain to digital media, but the RIAA and MPAA told them the law was good and congress believed them. I think most members of congress probably honestly believed they were simply adding to and clarifying copyright law as it pertains to digital media. But that's not what they did; the DMCA by nature cannot be applied fairly (since it only applies to digital media - an artist holding a copyright on a painting, for example, can't invoke it), and it so far has only really been invoked in this one specific way in lawsuits, which is in the restrictions it places on fair use rights defined elsewhere in copyright law.
The dude is selling this for $100,000 starting price. That's pretty insane. Unless you're a store wanting to resell this in a 3rd world country (even then, it'll be hard), you're not going to make your money back.
Yeah, a third world country like the USA...
There are a lot of import and collector's shops in this country. Most of them that I've been to are lucky to have one of the items on this list, and it'd usually be the showcase item in the store. I mean come on, a Dreamcast dev kit? Any store I know of would die to get their hands on one of those, and they'd slap a nice $1,000 price tag on it alone, easy.
In fact, this is obviously a HK retailer or wholesaler looking to dump a lot of stock quickly. It's not a collector, it's a guy who sells games for a living one way or another (he may not have an English web site or any US contacts; maybe this is the most convenient way for him to sell here). Look at his other auctions; no way he's got new, unopened copies of games (and systems) lying around because he's a collector. I collect games; this is not a game collector's collection, this is a game seller's collection.
That said, some of this stuff would get him into a lot of trouble if some of these companies found out he was selling it. I'm not sure if Ebay's going to let this auction go through to the end; dev kits, in particular, are mucho taboo to sell, though the older ones he could probably get away with. Nothing recent, though.
I will admit I'd give my left arm for this collection. If I had $100,000 to spare, I'd bid.
I just pull a hardback book off the shelf and use that. A half-inch thick book can absorb a fair amount of heat before it starts to get through and being a hardback, the laptop feet provide as much spacing as if it was flat on a desk.
I would honestly think the best possible solution would just be a hard, flat piece of plastic covered with some hard foam. The most important thing is not to restrict air flow from your fans, and the whole reason your laptop gets hot in your lap is that your legs are restricting that air flow. Personally, my laptop does not even get warm if it's sitting on a table with unrestricted airflow, so duplicating that surface while adding a little bit of heat absorbant material would probably be the best solution.
Reflecting heat back into the machine seems to me the worst possible solution. If I wanted something to do that I'd just put a towel or something between me and my laptop. This is not a solution to anything; all it will do is kill my laptop pretty quickly.
But you know what? This is just a general comment, but I've got a P4-M 2.4 laptop and the thing barely gets warm even with restricted airflow. People need to demand better thermal designs in their laptops. I always see people complaining about laptop heat, but it's like seeing people complaining about popups as a Firefox user - I don't even realize it's a problem until someone brings it up. Centrino laptops shouldn't really get warm at all, P4-M laptops should just barely get warm, and other Intel chips really don't belong in laptops to begin with (I don't really know anything about AMD's mobile chips, but I imagine they have similar thermal properties). It's all about the case and fan design. Devices such as the one in this article really have no reason to exist other than poor choices by the laptop manufacturer.
I'm a little annoyed by the attitude here. This is a pretty impressive reverse engineering job, but most of Slashdot is just laughing it off because the device was originally created for Pokemon related games.
I think the point is, what is the point? Ok, so you hacked a little low-power, low-resolution LCD mini-game device. Now what are you going to do with your newfound knowledge? Create other obsolete games that could be done better on other systems that have already been reverse-engineered themselves? I mean, why even bother?
There are a lot of stories about hacking for hacking's sake that show up on Slashdot; most of them I just shrug off and don't even bother reading, because they're really just irrelevant. But I do read the games-related ones, because it's my field, and it just seems like such a major waste of time whenever I see something like this.
I mean, ok, it's a hobby. That's cool; I have a lot of meaningless hobbies too, some of which are tech-related. I'm not saying these guys shouldn't do this; if they want to, good for them. But I'm not self-centered enough to believe my hobbies belong on a tech news site; I mean seriously, in what possible way could this affect more than literally one or two people who read this site and even actually own a Pokemon Mini?
Any news site/organization/whatever has to do some filtering of the stories it puts up, with a nod towards relevance to readers. Obviously, some stories are just in that weird/dumb category and you put them up for a sort of shock value. But that's all this is; there's no real practical application for this, and it's not worthy of being called an "impressive reverse engineering job" precisely because there was no real reason for this thing to be reverse engineered in the first place. Anything can be reverse engineered given enough time and effort, but not everything really needs to be.
Doesn't it look like one locked down device has usurped another ?
I'm guessing you mean the iPod is a locked-down device too. But it isn't. It'll play non-DRM'd mp3's just as well as it'll play AAC files, which Sony players won't. Personally, *no one* I know plays anything but regular old mp3's on their iPod. I'm sure there are people out there that do use it for Apple AAC, but I would think those people are in the clear minority. People don't call the iPod and others of its ilk "mp3 players" for nothing. This is a clear fact that Sony and the rest of the RIAA (and don't forget, Sony *is* a member of the RIAA) don't seem to grasp. The iPod is a success because it plays mp3's. If it didn't, it would have failed. And mp3's are as popular as they are because they can be easily copied and traded, whatever the legality of it. It's as simple as that - if a hardware company wants a music device to succeed, it must support the standard mp3 format, which is what most everyone has the vast majority of their music in to begin with, and not for nothing either.
Sony really has no such thing as an mp3 player - even their upcoming iPod competitor converts mp3's to ATRAC as you copy them over, from what I've read. It's an ATRAC player just like all their other digital music players (other than CD players, which are a dying market). Honestly, I half believe that the true nature of the PSP - which is considered a gaming device right now - is as a media player designed to popularize Sony Connect. It won't work, but I do believe that's the plan, to sort of sneak in there and make music a value-added feature of this device they expect to be popular for other reasons. And of course that music will be in the ATRAC format.
Anyway, the RIAA is really smoking crack if they think people are going to have anything to do with fingerprinting to get their music. It almost reminds me of that Seinfeld episode where David Dinkins proposed a law requiring all New Yorkers to wear name tags all the time. I mean it's about that dumb. It's not even that it won't work (which it won't), it's that NO ONE will buy such a system, even if it means they don't get to listen to any new music. There's plenty of good music around already to listen to - more than I'd ever have time for in my life, that's for sure.
Wouldn't that be a movie written, directed,
:)
post-produced, and distributed by bots?
A good, semi-serious observation that brings me to the point I initially thought when I read the headline...
What about many of the avant-garde films of the 1960's, some of which did not feature traditionally "filmed" subjects at all (some of them literally just had objects pressed between the celluloid layers of film, giving a kaleidescope effect when the film was run). And what about animation? Not all animation features voices at all (witness old Road Runner cartoons) - are they not "completely artificial", at least in the same sense that the film in question here is? Does the medium itself (film vs. digital) make a difference, and if so, what if you simply digitized those old RR cartoons?
Like you, I would say that none of these films - including the one in this story - are artificial. They were all created by humans, and as long as humans are creating them there's nothing artificial about them, and to me, nothing particularly interesting either (at least not as far as the novelty; the film itself may be interesting, I don't know).
What I will find amazing is when we can apply the turing test to films - when a computer can literally write, direct, "shoot", edit, act, and do everything else itself, with no input from the humans. Even if humans programmed the applications that do it, that would still be quite an amazing feat. It would be still more amazing if these apps could then self-adapt to make better films, but then you're into talking about Matrix-like stuff
FLCL was 2000
FLCL was 2000 and 2001 - the series ended at the end of March 2001.
Lain and Cowboy Bebop were 1998.
Cowboy Bebop *started* in 1998. The series ended in 1999; the movie was produced in 2001.
Lain is the only one you've got me on.
And IMO, Spirited Away is in Miyazaki's top percentile of films - a lot of people didn't quite get it, if you ask me. I ask people here what they think it was about and they're usually not close. Maybe it's a cultural thing.
>And WHO needs MS mediaplayers anyhow...
Have any pointers to alternatives ?
Plenty of alternatives exist, it depends on what you want to do. I think the idea that anyone would use one "media player" for everything is just stupid - at least when it's a company out for its own interest releasing the player (as opposed to, say, an open-source free software project designed to collate as many formats as possible into one application).
I would never use an MS media player to rip anything. I use EAC/LAME for that.
I would never use an MS media player to play back mp3's. I use iTunes for that, and it works great - so well, in fact, that apart from needed performance tweaks I doubt Apple or anyone else will ever be able to release a better player for this purpose.
I would never use an MS media player to play back QuickTime files - in fact you can't use it for this, as far as I know of. I use QuickTime to play its native format.
I would never use an MS media player to play DVD's. I use WinDVD for that, and it has a lot more DVD playback options than WMP - it's not even close. There is absolutely nothing WMP offers over any of the standalone DVD player apps out there.
In fact, really the *only* thing I would use WMP for is to play back Windows Media files. And I do use Windows Media whenever I do video capture, partly because the Windows Media 9 codec is a nice codec that supports ultra-high resolution as well as 5.1 surround sound, and also because MS gives away a very nice little free video capture and encoder utility called Windows Media Encoder. This is an example where MS is actually providing me something of value, and so I use it.
So I'm not seeing WMP is useless, just that it can never be a jack-of-all-trades, especially with this "DRM 10" built into it (DRM 10? There have been 9 other versions of this?). There is no such thing as a "media player" as far as I'm concerned (I never got mplayer to play all the formats I wanted in Linux either!); there are only mp3 players, DVD players, "windows media" players, Real players, QuickTime players, etc. Each player with its own native format; it's own specialization that it does best, and that gives you the most freedom to use your media as you see fit. All of these companies want to monopolize your media, and you'd be stupid to give up that control to them.
Oh, I also just find it really silly that everyone is now building "media players" to act as web browsers - but only to their online music store addresses! This isn't "integration", this is just a stupid web page rendered in the player window! I can navigate with my own damn browser, thank you - this is another function that media players just should not have.
(yes, I've disabled the music store in iTunes - no way I'd pay 99 cents for a DRM-encrusted song anyway.)
I haven't seen a decent anime made after 1998.
Then you haven't seen Lain, FLCL, Spirited Away, Cowboy Bebop, or any number of other series I could name.
I always see this criticism that "anime sucks" now, that it was better in the good old days. Well, as with most things, there really was no "good old days" and you're probably just remembering anime as you first encountered it, when it was new and different to you. But anime itself is not very old (the 1950's, really, was the start of it), it generally wasn't really much better than the level of American Saturday morning cartoons until at least the mid 1980's (and even then the good stuff was mostly confined to guys like Miyazaki and Leiji Matsumoto), and it's actually diversified since then. Yes, there's a lot of crap, but there was *always* a lot of crap... there's also some good stuff too these days, in a variety of styles that didn't even exist a decade or so ago.
It's true, though, that the money has run out on a lot of studios, and it shows in many cases. Series are shorter than they used to be - there are fewer long-running TV series now, and OVA's (straight-to-video releases) now usually run just a few episodes. But a series like FLCL demonstrates just how much you can do with a short series and not much money - it's a brilliant satire/parody of anime cliches, and one of the most energetic, fun, funny, and in the end seriously well-written series I've ever seen. As in, actually somewhat profound.
I don't necessarily think financial hard times are always a bad thing in art and entertainment. The appetite for anime in Japan is insatiable - it's everywhere, and it's not dying anytime soon. If producers are forced to work on shoestring budgets with compacted storylines, maybe they'll focus a bit more on plot, character, and *interesting* animation rather than just overblown Hollywood-style productions. FLCL showed the way, we'll see if others can pick up where it left off.
Ditching the white earphones was a good first step - I would also suggest not using a fancy case to carry around your laptop - those leather targus bags just scream "look at me! expensive stuff here!"
I would suggest not even using a bag that's *shaped* like a laptop. Use a backpack or something, that has a padded laptop area. Make sure you "rough up" the bag a bit ahead of time (just throw it around against some rocks or something, or the pavement). As with any bag in the city, never let it out of your hand. But if it's not obvious you're even carrying a laptop to begin with, people will be less inclined to want to steal it.
I have an oversized army jacket that I use for when I want to carry gadgets around without a bag. I can easily fit my PDA in there, a small digital camera, or an iPod, all without any bulge. I'm not big on those jackets made specifically for carrying gadgets around, because I mean, come on. If it's a jacket made specifically for carrying gadgets around, it's going to be obvious to any criminal that that's why you have it!
...it's a work in progress. Of course, it could be argued that all of Linux-dom is a work-in-progress as well. So that makes the statement rather silly I suppose.
But posting a review of an on-going project and damning it is somewhat inappropriate if only because it is unconstructive.
If it were a review of a closed-source commercial project, it is more understandable as these projects aren't truly considered on-going since each version of a given product is usually considered stand-alone with the exception of bug fixes.
I think you're missing the point, which is that this way of thinking is the entire problem. It's no excuse to say "it's a work in progress, as is all of Linux". People need to get away from this idea if Linux is expected to go anywhere. At some point, people actually need to be able to start *using* Linux, not tinkering and fixing things all the time. And as long as simple and basic problems like this exist in major distributions, that's not going to happen.
I have been a Red Hat user for a long time (I was a Mandrake user before that). I installed FC1 when it was released, once Red Hat stopped producing regular Red Hat for all types of users. I didn't really have any major problems with it; just the standard Linux annoyances along with FC's well-known inability to play MP3's out of the box. But I won't install FC2. I'm not about to try to repair my boot partition, or manually partition things myself. I don't run an OS for the purpose of putzing around and fixing things all the time; I run an OS for the purpose of using my computer.
I'm not really sure where to turn, as one of the great things about FC is apt-get support, and that's not universal among all distro's. I guess I will have to check out Debian (apt's native distro), although I'm not sure if it's as polished as FC is in terms of user interface (I actually like Bluecurve). There is still no distro that has everything; ease of use, polished interface, stability, speed. I had hoped FC would be it, but it isn't. I realize it's supposed to be Red Hat's "cutting edge" version of Linux, but I didn't expect that meant it would ship with show-stopper bugs like this.
Actually, the extrapolation procedure doesn't work too bad. It's just a matter of connecting the dots. I have a book from 20+ years ago about the future of video games. Some of the claims were:
* Games could allow more than two players. Perhaps even enough to play a full game of soccer or football! (The picture showed a "dome" with controls in a ring around it.)
* Games will be able to be played over great distances! (The picture showed a chess board with a wireless antenna on it.)
* Games will be so much more realistic! (Shows a handheld game with a full scene of a motor bike jumping a dirt ramp.)
It's no stretch to think that in the future, graphics will be better, and different types of games will be possible with more computing power. But statements like the following have really becoome a pet peeve of mine:
Computer games in 2034 are likely to offer simulated worlds and interactive storytelling that's more engaging than linear presentations such as those in most movies today.
News flash: people *like* linear presentations and plotlines. We don't have linear presentations in games right now because of any technical limitation in the medium, we have them because that's what people *want*. Case in point: the Final Fantasy series. FFXI - the first MMORPG in the series - has sold fewer than 700,000 copies worldwide on both the PC and PS2. FFX - the last truly linear game in the series - sold 5 *million* copies on *one* system. FFX-2 was offline but also not linear, and it was criticized by some as a result and did not sell as well as FFX. Part of the reason people buy games in this series is *because* of the linear story-telling in them.
There will be a market for both types of games in the future, as there is now. I'm not saying linear games are all the market has room for. But we've had linear presentations in various mediums going back *thousands* of years; it's a method of storytelling that's been perfected by many skilled artisans. Can you imagine Shakespeare as a choose-your-own-adventure? Our human desire for linear stories goes much deeper than simple technical limitations; such stories are present in all cultures and have been basically since man learned to communicate.
There's nothing "more engaging" about persistent worlds; in fact they've already become passe, with most MMORPG's just copying each other. It's just a different style of gameplay, which has yet to reach maturity. Someday it will, but there is nothing inherently superior about that method of gameplay, just as there is nothing inherently superior in sports games vs. RPG's or in fighting games vs. platformers. They're just different genres.
I don't have any problem with extrapolation to predict the future in computing, because most of that extrapolation is born of the assumption that processors will continue to get faster, and applications more complex. I think that's a safe assumption to make. But I do have problems with expectations of fundamental shifts in the way humans have enjoyed their leisure time for centuries just because a faster CPU enables them to. It's not up to consumers to fit their interests around their PC's; it's up to hardware manufacturers and application designers to fit their products to consumers' interests.
By letting Pixar go, Disney doesn't GAIN anything they weren't already entitled to under the old contract. But, as you point out, they're not losing anything either.
Well, not technically. But they "lost" all of the future revenue they would have had from future Pixar films. They lost the *potential* for revenue from future films, which is what companies are based on after all - revenue potential, not current revenue. A company with no future is not a company for very long, pretty much by definition.
So Disney did give up a lot, quite a lot. I really doubt Pixar will keep up this run of massive hits forever, but assuming they even put up half the gross over the next five movies, that's still $1.25 billion in gross Disney just threw away.
Was Disney put in an impossible position by Pixar's demands? I don't think so. Pixar had become Disney's animation business and they knew it. Disney's in-house animation has stunk up the business for years and it's only getting worse - that's of Disney's own doing. It was Disney's mis-management that put Pixar in the position they were in, where they could make such demands, and in my opinion Disney was in no position to refuse them, even as unreasonable as they sounded.
If you run an ice cream stand, it's not you or your stand that people are coming for, it's the ice cream you're selling. And you need to get that ice cream from somewhere, whether it's by making it yourself or by buying it from someone else. Without ice cream people want to buy, you may as well not have an ice cream stand, right?
The question is, does Disney want to be in the animation business or not? Letting Pixar go suggests to me that they don't - otherwise, there's really no price that would have been too high to pay. This was their source of ice cream. Without Pixar, there is no animation business at Disney anymore, and they need to rely even more on their theme parks (which are nothing without their animation business) and ABC. Eventually, the theme parks cannot really survive without the animation, as it's all based on Disney's "branding".
I don't usually like to sound too dramatic about these things, as most companies can survive events like this, but I really think Disney threw away their core business here, first by letting their own animation division fall apart, then by throwing away their only remaining source of reliable animation revenue. They no longer have anything they can really market as Disney animation with a straight face. (Personally, I think their Studio Ghibli contract has left them with some films better than either their own *or* anything Pixar has ever done, but they'll never use them to their potential - they're too hung-up on 3D right now). Without that animation, their theme parks decline, and then the whole company crumbles. Disney cannot survive just as ABC.
This was not a win for Disney. The deal Pixar wanted was not a very good one for Disney, but it was the lesser of two evils.
If you can play back Vorbis, then why would you care if your collection doesn't meet the most common standard? I bought an iHP-120 and I don't care if anybody else can listen to my tracks or not because I can hear them fine.
And what happens when 4 years from now your screen dies and it either a) costs more to fix it than to buy a new player, or b) there are no parts available anymore? Or what if you drop it and it breaks? So you have to buy a new player, and who knows what formats players will play by that time?
The only format that's guaranteed to be around, and will be the "default" format for all hardware players (except those made by Sony) - simply because so many people already have such a large collection built up - is MP3. I think this test is basically affirmation that even if all you care about is sound quality, it's still ok to use MP3 and get the best of all possible worlds - sound quality and compatibility.
MP3 was going to be around for many, many years anyway... but if it finally overcomes its undeserved reputation for being a "last-generation" codec with poor sound quality (an idea being promoted by the RIAA through their DRM partners at Apple and MS), it'll probably be around forever. This test proves MP3 is a fine codec for high fidelity and it also happens to be the most compatible and future-proof in the bargain.
on the legal way -> itunes is better
on the illegal way -> even old mp3 (next to vorbis or aac) is better
Illegal?? How is ripping my own CD's to MP3 illegal?
I have ripped all of my CD's to 320k max VBR MP3's using LAME (with EAC as a front-end). There's nothing illegal about this, and based on this listening test I'm quite confident that all of my music sounds at least as good, and probably better (in some cases probably significantly better) than if I'd re-purchased those same songs through iTunes (or ripped them to 128k AAC). And I have max compatibility among devices, with no DRM.
If this test proved anything, it's that Apple's and MS's claims that their codecs sound better than MP3's recorded at twice the bitrate is a load of bunk. All the codecs are at least comparable at the same bitrate, but a few are a little bit better than the others. In the end, for me it comes down to compatibility. I have no idea if the next player I buy will be an iPod, so why would I want to tie myself down to that player, especially when other codecs sound just as good, bit for bit?
btw, I tried taking this test, and honestly, I gave up because most of the time I could not even tell which was the original and which was the compressed version of the song. In my opinion any of these codecs yields more than acceptable sound quality. I see in a few cases one or another codec was significantly worse than the others on specific tracks (I probably just didn't get that far) but in most cases the high scores here (in the high 4's for the most part) show that all of these codecs do a good job at producing compressions nearly indistinguishable from the original even at 128k. Given a higher bitrate, they'd do just that much better.
its been out for a year now, actually i think longer, how is this headline news, it seems more like a ad to me. now if the guy MADE them himself like i know a lot of people have and posted how, then i would be impressed
Not only has the damn thing been out for more than a year, there are already dozens of reviews posted, many from more reputable sources. As you can see, pretty easy to find them too.
I've just learned to expect that every day or so a story like this will slip through. It'd be one thing to announced that the trackball has actually shipped (something a lot of people have been waiting for for a long time!) - that'd be news, honestly. But a new review of their base controller that those who need already have? No, this is not news. I was disappointed when I clicked through; I thought this must be a new product.
I predict the phenonmenon of making ringtones out of the latest teen pop will fade quickly as more and more annoying idiots are beaten to death with their own phones. It's happened in isolated incidents before but now we'll have critical mass.
It's been going on in Japan for about the past decade (the pop ringtones, not the death beatings). It's not a fad there, and as we seem to latch on to their tech and ideas for using it about five years after they do, I have a feeling it's not going to be a fad here either.
In fact I've always wondered how the copyright issue works there in respect to this. I don't know of any music group that's raised a stink about it there, despite the fact that there are probably thousands (literally) of paid, officially sanctioned iMode sites where you can download whatever ringtones you want. Maybe their music industry is just a lot more relaxed than ours?
(The "paid" part of it is money going to NTT DoCoMo, just their standard fee for being part of the service; there's no extra tacked on for these sites that goes to the music industry.)
I still can't figure out how he keeps getting work.. He's all explosion and nothing else.. his best movie was Face-Off and even that had the most implausible story.
You have obviously never seen one of his Hong Kong movies. He perfected the "buddy movie", in that his movies were not just Lethal Weapon-style action flicks with one comedian playing off a straight man - they were always emotional, usually with the "buddies" actually being villain/hero playing against each other. "The Killer" is the example most people use of this, where both the hero and villain identify with each other and respect each other and both are out to "save" the same girl.
A lot of Hollywood directors took inspiration from him, but nobody has managed to copy his formula.
When he came to Hollywood (forced to by the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong, as much of the HK movie industry was), he no longer had full control over his films. He has never, to my knowledge (and I may be wrong on this at this point), been the sole writer on any of his American films as he was on his HK films (even if he's credited as such, I'm sure script doctors have gone through and "fixed" any scripts he has written). He has also had to work with more established Hollywood crew members, and powerful producers, so his films have much less of his own personal stamp on them.
To say his best movie is "Face Off" is pretty ridiculous. Go out and see "The Killer", "Hard Boiled", or "A Better Tomorrow" and then talk to me.
Personally, if you're going to count only his American films, I actually enjoyed Mission Impossible 2 quite a bit. It's still not on the level of humor, emotional attachment or style as his HK films, but it's very polished, exciting, better written and at least *more* stylish than his other American films. I believe that was the first film here where he at least had some major influence on the script, though he did not write it himself.