Have you seen the job requirements for Taiwanese companies? Even the salesman are required to have Masters degrees in Science, in case they are asked to describe the physics behind their new product...
Silly person, there are places where real life console developers hang out. It sure as hell isn't a place where all the little fatbabies trash migrated to...
Ah, perhaps you are in marketing or HR and they wouldn't let you in:-)
OK that might be a bit harsh of me...
I take it you are not a fan of Mr Larry Giddon then; however you have undermined your point about game developers never commenting by your admission of various chat groups' existance. I find thechaosengine to be entertaining anyway, although I thought some of the fatbabies email list messages were... unprofessional... so I never got into that.
And the point is, you as an AC are deprecating gamasutra/game developer. When I wrote a couple of articles for them many years ago it was mostly fanboy/amateur orientated. But it is much more serious now; they have a large mindshare amongst real developers.
As for PS3; if I work on a PS3 game I won't mind at all. I will get a Wii myself for updates of zelda/mario, but then I bought a PS2 well after a gamecube, when it started to get good (third party) games on it. OK, I bought it for Kingdom Hearts.
With unit quaternions you can sort of kind of get away with just storing 3 values and calculating the fourth, although you have to be careful with interpolation (some sort of gimbal problem might turn up). Still, that is nicer than interpolating euler angles, and saves space in your animations.
It is why supporters of Corker in Tennessee aired an ad indicating that Harold Ford Jr. is interested in white women.
You would have to be american to think that that was racist in some way. They claimed he went to a playboy sponsored party. Are you telling me that playboy have never featured non-white women in their magazine? Now that would be wierd.
More significant (but not in the ad) was him ranting about the nuclear threat USA faces from the aspirations of Australia, Argentina and South Africa. WTF? South Africa is the only country who has had the nuclear bomb and then (voluntarily) disarmed itself of it (years ago). Australia is one of your staunchest allies, shoring up your rear now that you decided to give up on fighting al-quaeda and the taliban so you could concentrate on Iraq instead.
I agree with your sentiments but think that your obsession with voting for the ever-so-slightly-lessor of two evils is a cop-out. Out of 300 million americans can't you even find 100 good ones?
Sometimes I wonder where people get their ideas about what America is about.
From hollywood and the news. According to Hollywood, every precinct has a quota of one uncorrupt cop, every southern town is a deathtrap for motorists with cars that break down, cops are allowed to shoot people in the back as they run away, rape is expected in prison, it takes 30 seconds to trace a phone call, and US made cars will explode in a fireball if they so much as get a scratch on the paintwork.
On that last point, if I worked in detroit in the 1970s and saw a hollywood film I would think "hey, perhaps we shouldn't put the fuel-tank inside the fender!"
Is "stop or i'll shoot (you in the back)" to an unarmed suspect legal in the USA? I don't know. I know it is very illegal in the UK (despite the Jean Charles Menazes case) but according to Hollywood it is legal, so who should I believe?
Hardly accidental; there are several lines of voiceover dialog for it. Those voice actors don't just say random lines (yet... Tom Baker (Dr. Who) did a mammoth recording session for British Telecom which you can get him to say anything in text to speech, but AFAIK all modern games use prerecorded lines rather than phonemes).
Well the houses I was looking at buying had "covenants" on the land that were dated in the 1890s between two people who are long-dead; yet they are still in force (e.g. no alcohol to be sold, no buildings close to the boundary line). I wonder who enforces them. I guess anyone who thinks you are lowering the property value of the area.
Wrong! Tony Blair signed away British independance recently. Any UK citizen can be extradited on the say so of the US courts without even having to show any evidence. Naturally that extradition treaty is not bi-directional.
You haven't said why you dislike India though! All those points seem to be about the USA.
Bubonic plague is endemic in USA in wild animals.
San Francisco and other cities have heaps of panhandlers sleeping on the streets. Not like New Zealand or Ireland.
San Francisco and other cities (as above).
OK, USA is not quite so bad as some countries, but USA has only recently (2000) got rid of laws banning black and white people from marrying, or religiously inspired anti-homosexual laws. The amendment separating church and state is very much under pressure (teaching evolution, gay marriage, school prayer, "in god we trust" etc.) but it is nice that the USA pays at least lip-service to it.
Hah! You can be thrown into guantanemo bay with no legal representation, and that is legal now (instead of the CIA pretending they didn't do it). The new dictatorship law Bush signed lets him decide who goes there with no oversight or comeback.
I thought that Microsoft got exclusivity to both sports games (FIFA and Pro-Evo)... or does the PS3 have some kick-ass tiddlywink simulator or curling championship game?:-)
That reminds me of stories of a "whiz-kid" teenager in the 1980s (perhaps Matthew Smith or Tony Crowther ) who signed over the rights to his video games to a publisher, but since he was under 18 at the time the contract was not legally binding to him. So he was able to move to a different publisher with a better deal. i.e. being a minor left him in a strong position w.r.t. intellectual property rights, but contract law was different. No doubt with schools they get the parents to sign any contracts anyway though.
Perhaps, but from what I read the rate of muggings in the UK is quite high.
But that includes kids stealing other kids lunch money. I'm not sure you record that the same way, and I wouldn't want to arm kids on their way to school.
Most major western countries do have sales taxes. For example in the UK it is 17.5%
What I was objecting to was
(a) they don't include the tax in the advertised price marked on the item and
(b) the after-tax values are weird amounts, which is annoying if you are buying just a couple of items and were hoping for it to be a dollar amount. It makes it harder to get the exact change out of your wallet while you are going to the till.
Also, sales taxes on essentials (food, fuel etc.) proportionately affect the poor more than the rich, so it is a slightly regressive tax, but economists might argue that the poor would only waste the money anyway;-) i.e. that it is a good thing to penalise spending compared to saving. I haven't thought much about that myself. I have heard that "sin taxes" have had some good effect, for instance turning 19th century gin-soaked england into a nation of beer drinkers instead.
Nobody in their right mind uses an odd number like $225 when pricing here
Yeah but you try buying an item in the USA using cash. Most american goods have very odd prices once you take into account tax. Is there any other country in the world where an item is marked as $9.95 on the shelf but you can't buy it with a ten dollar note, since they add some random amount to it? Would it hurt americans to tell the truth about such a small thing as the price of a chocolate bar in a grocery store? </pet_rant>
Oh great, you want australia to go back to the "white australia" policy where immigration was based on your race, instead of the points based system they have at the moment? If you can't get in at the moment, go back to school and learn a useful skill. Don't treat your skin colour as a meal ticket. BTW, very nice calendar.
(says pommiekiwifruit who got into the EU via... ancestry... oops)
I really admire the New Zealand government for consistantly having the backbone to stand up for what is "right" the heavyweight nations. They have a long tradition of doing this whereas Australia has started to get a reputation for folding when the USA starts throwing their economic/military weight around.
Two words: Rainbow Warrior. New Zealand folded into letting free the perpetrators of the only foreign terrorist attack ever carried out on NZ soil, after Mitterand (who it turns out was also supporting a secret child at taxpayers' expense and subverting democracy in germany)'s government threatened to bully the EU into cut all exports from NZ unless the terrorists Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur were released to french custody (and hence to medals/parades etc.). Them hiring out the Prime Minister's own property (David Lange) for the crime was just taking the piss. But they got away with it.
That is what flytippers do. Well, they take the money. Except that they don't deliver it to the landfill; they dump it over the local cricket pitch, or nature reserve.
How would you do that? Find out who the appraiser the bank is sending in is and try to bribe them? As i have just bought a house in England I didn't get a choice in who the surveyor was.
Thanks for your detailed reply. If I may cherry-pick:
Jeff Minter is a human xerox machine.
Having now looked at Gridrunner++ I can say I am disturbed by the amount of copied content (not game mechanics) in it. The sound samples sound like a remix of defender sound effects, and the graphics include characters redrawn from at least galaxians, asteroids, tempest, 1942, and commodore and atari logos. I think that is inappropriate for a game released in the 2000s that is not a work of satire. Also the.exe stats he did write the code in Visual C++, so I must be confusing that SKU with another which was written by fans in BASIC which he then republished. But I still feel his output has a distinctive style.
Sonic is an awesome game
I agree with that even more now than when it first came out (when I wondered why Sega was developing a Felix the Cat platformer). It required high quality mapping in order to allow the character's speed to work.
I would thank you to stop guessing at my beliefs.
Well I'm glad you can make them explicit in your posts. That way my misunderstandings can be cleared up.
As far as what I drive, why are you guessing? You have no idea.
A Ferrari is the stereotypical reward for writing a best-selling game with a generous contract. I don't even drive! In your blog you talk about getting interest in a game (e.g. Sudoku for the DS; which may be somewhat of a crowded market what with Brain Training already having sold millions of units) but not claiming massive sales. I am suggesting that you have not yet had a huge seller. I have not yet had a generous contract. Remember that Jeff did top the US sales charts in 1982 when Gridrunner knocked Choplifter off the top spot. He was nominated for "Development Legend" status at the Develop Awards 2004 alongside Michel Ancel and winner Peter Molyneaux, so it's not entirely self-appointed.
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Have you seen the job requirements for Taiwanese companies? Even the salesman are required to have Masters degrees in Science, in case they are asked to describe the physics behind their new product...
Heck, even the CEOs can read write and count!
Ah, perhaps you are in marketing or HR and they wouldn't let you in :-)
OK that might be a bit harsh of me...
I take it you are not a fan of Mr Larry Giddon then; however you have undermined your point about game developers never commenting by your admission of various chat groups' existance. I find thechaosengine to be entertaining anyway, although I thought some of the fatbabies email list messages were... unprofessional... so I never got into that.
And the point is, you as an AC are deprecating gamasutra/game developer. When I wrote a couple of articles for them many years ago it was mostly fanboy/amateur orientated. But it is much more serious now; they have a large mindshare amongst real developers.
As for PS3; if I work on a PS3 game I won't mind at all. I will get a Wii myself for updates of zelda/mario, but then I bought a PS2 well after a gamecube, when it started to get good (third party) games on it. OK, I bought it for Kingdom Hearts.
With unit quaternions you can sort of kind of get away with just storing 3 values and calculating the fourth, although you have to be careful with interpolation (some sort of gimbal problem might turn up). Still, that is nicer than interpolating euler angles, and saves space in your animations.
Not quite right. At least for Europe (the largest single market in the world) the situation is:
And Sony will probably sue anyone from Europe who tries to get a PS3 from overseas.
You are assuming those PS2s were bought by new users, not to replace a series of broken PS2s.
You would have to be american to think that that was racist in some way. They claimed he went to a playboy sponsored party. Are you telling me that playboy have never featured non-white women in their magazine? Now that would be wierd.
More significant (but not in the ad) was him ranting about the nuclear threat USA faces from the aspirations of Australia, Argentina and South Africa. WTF? South Africa is the only country who has had the nuclear bomb and then (voluntarily) disarmed itself of it (years ago). Australia is one of your staunchest allies, shoring up your rear now that you decided to give up on fighting al-quaeda and the taliban so you could concentrate on Iraq instead.
I agree with your sentiments but think that your obsession with voting for the ever-so-slightly-lessor of two evils is a cop-out. Out of 300 million americans can't you even find 100 good ones?
Have you heard of the Jain religion? Some people sweep the street in front of them so that they don't accidentally stand on an insect.
From hollywood and the news. According to Hollywood, every precinct has a quota of one uncorrupt cop, every southern town is a deathtrap for motorists with cars that break down, cops are allowed to shoot people in the back as they run away, rape is expected in prison, it takes 30 seconds to trace a phone call, and US made cars will explode in a fireball if they so much as get a scratch on the paintwork.
On that last point, if I worked in detroit in the 1970s and saw a hollywood film I would think "hey, perhaps we shouldn't put the fuel-tank inside the fender!"
Is "stop or i'll shoot (you in the back)" to an unarmed suspect legal in the USA? I don't know. I know it is very illegal in the UK (despite the Jean Charles Menazes case) but according to Hollywood it is legal, so who should I believe?
That would be the NZ that bottom dredges the south pacific with 5 trawlers wreaking havok on the seabed, yes?
Hardly accidental; there are several lines of voiceover dialog for it. Those voice actors don't just say random lines (yet... Tom Baker (Dr. Who) did a mammoth recording session for British Telecom which you can get him to say anything in text to speech, but AFAIK all modern games use prerecorded lines rather than phonemes).
Hmm, well "Spy Boy" did lead to the sequel "Spy Boy 2", but yeah, that was a rather limited audience...
Well the houses I was looking at buying had "covenants" on the land that were dated in the 1890s between two people who are long-dead; yet they are still in force (e.g. no alcohol to be sold, no buildings close to the boundary line). I wonder who enforces them. I guess anyone who thinks you are lowering the property value of the area.
i.e. every square-enix character, ever. Spikey silver hair optional.
Wrong! Tony Blair signed away British independance recently. Any UK citizen can be extradited on the say so of the US courts without even having to show any evidence. Naturally that extradition treaty is not bi-directional.
You haven't said why you dislike India though! All those points seem to be about the USA.
So what were the criticisms against India?
I thought that Microsoft got exclusivity to both sports games (FIFA and Pro-Evo)... or does the PS3 have some kick-ass tiddlywink simulator or curling championship game? :-)
That reminds me of stories of a "whiz-kid" teenager in the 1980s (perhaps Matthew Smith or Tony Crowther ) who signed over the rights to his video games to a publisher, but since he was under 18 at the time the contract was not legally binding to him. So he was able to move to a different publisher with a better deal. i.e. being a minor left him in a strong position w.r.t. intellectual property rights, but contract law was different. No doubt with schools they get the parents to sign any contracts anyway though.
But that includes kids stealing other kids lunch money. I'm not sure you record that the same way, and I wouldn't want to arm kids on their way to school.
Most major western countries do have sales taxes. For example in the UK it is 17.5% ;-) i.e. that it is a good thing to penalise spending compared to saving. I haven't thought much about that myself. I have heard that "sin taxes" have had some good effect, for instance turning 19th century gin-soaked england into a nation of beer drinkers instead.
What I was objecting to was
(a) they don't include the tax in the advertised price marked on the item and
(b) the after-tax values are weird amounts, which is annoying if you are buying just a couple of items and were hoping for it to be a dollar amount. It makes it harder to get the exact change out of your wallet while you are going to the till.
Also, sales taxes on essentials (food, fuel etc.) proportionately affect the poor more than the rich, so it is a slightly regressive tax, but economists might argue that the poor would only waste the money anyway
Yeah but you try buying an item in the USA using cash. Most american goods have very odd prices once you take into account tax. Is there any other country in the world where an item is marked as $9.95 on the shelf but you can't buy it with a ten dollar note, since they add some random amount to it? Would it hurt americans to tell the truth about such a small thing as the price of a chocolate bar in a grocery store? </pet_rant>
(says pommiekiwifruit who got into the EU via... ancestry... oops)
Two words: Rainbow Warrior. New Zealand folded into letting free the perpetrators of the only foreign terrorist attack ever carried out on NZ soil, after Mitterand (who it turns out was also supporting a secret child at taxpayers' expense and subverting democracy in germany)'s government threatened to bully the EU into cut all exports from NZ unless the terrorists Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur were released to french custody (and hence to medals/parades etc.). Them hiring out the Prime Minister's own property (David Lange) for the crime was just taking the piss. But they got away with it.
That is what flytippers do. Well, they take the money. Except that they don't deliver it to the landfill; they dump it over the local cricket pitch, or nature reserve.
How would you do that? Find out who the appraiser the bank is sending in is and try to bribe them? As i have just bought a house in England I didn't get a choice in who the surveyor was.
Jeff Minter is a human xerox machine.
Having now looked at Gridrunner++ I can say I am disturbed by the amount of copied content (not game mechanics) in it. The sound samples sound like a remix of defender sound effects, and the graphics include characters redrawn from at least galaxians, asteroids, tempest, 1942, and commodore and atari logos. I think that is inappropriate for a game released in the 2000s that is not a work of satire. Also the .exe stats he did write the code in Visual C++, so I must be confusing that SKU with another which was written by fans in BASIC which he then republished. But I still feel his output has a distinctive style.
Sonic is an awesome game
I agree with that even more now than when it first came out (when I wondered why Sega was developing a Felix the Cat platformer). It required high quality mapping in order to allow the character's speed to work.
I would thank you to stop guessing at my beliefs.
Well I'm glad you can make them explicit in your posts. That way my misunderstandings can be cleared up.
As far as what I drive, why are you guessing? You have no idea.
A Ferrari is the stereotypical reward for writing a best-selling game with a generous contract. I don't even drive! In your blog you talk about getting interest in a game (e.g. Sudoku for the DS; which may be somewhat of a crowded market what with Brain Training already having sold millions of units) but not claiming massive sales. I am suggesting that you have not yet had a huge seller. I have not yet had a generous contract. Remember that Jeff did top the US sales charts in 1982 when Gridrunner knocked Choplifter off the top spot. He was nominated for "Development Legend" status at the Develop Awards 2004 alongside Michel Ancel and winner Peter Molyneaux, so it's not entirely self-appointed.