Is the problem with crap sequels that "people buy them," or that "you don't like them?" Realistically, if "crap sequels" and movie tie-in games didn't sell, publishers wouldn't make them. And honestly, over the past 15 years, if people never enjoyed any sequels or movie tie-in games, they wouldn't still be buying them. So, for a large segment of the game buying population, sequels and movie tie-ins are good, positive, things.
That doesn't at all mean that publishers are not trying to build new franchises, or that there aren't scrappy independents (a la the Darwinia guys), or famous rich dudes (a la Will Wright) making neat ideas.
The videogame industry is not a zero-sum game. The existence of sequels and licensed games does not preclude the existance innovative, experimental games. And in fact, the ratio of innovative titles (Katamari, Ico, Darwinina, Bridge Builder, Puzzle Pirates, etc) per year versus sequels and licensed games probably outpaces the ratio of quality new TV shows versus typical TV crap. Bottom line: you could only buy so-called "innovative" games and pick up at least a 12 - 15 console titles a year, never mind how many PC games you could buy. (Yeah, some of them may be failed experiments (Robot Alchemy Destruction, anyone?) but that's the chance you take when you buy experimental games.)
Frankly, that's a pretty good rate. If you buy 15 games a year you are well entrenched into the "hardcore" demographic.
For a while Google was distributing some distributed computing options with the Toolbar. They don't seem to mention them anymore, so I guess they're gone... OR ARE THEY...
Seriously, if Google ever flips its evil bit, we're all fucked.
Right... except the PS1 crushed the N64 in the market, and the PS2 crushed the GameCube. So I'm not sure exactly what the advantage is at this point...
To you or me, it's obvious, but let's give credit when credit is due: after all the pointless, stupid, incorrect, negative articles about games, it's excellent to see some (well deserved) good press.
Degrees are impressive, but not nearly as impressive (to me) as shipped games. Look, I understand MIT is a very difficult school, and that people come out of it knowing a lot, but in _my_ experince (your results may vary), I have interviewed a good number of candidates from MIT who can tell me lots about their experience with tons of high level systems that they have played with at MIT (usually that were already built), but very little about anything that's applicable to game programming. In one example, I remeber being an interview and thinking "we need someone who knows assembly, and this person is basically talking about the great stuff they did using LOGO."
Of course, I've also met people from MIT who are brilliant and have built brilliant systems (and I work with some), but seeing a beaver on someone's ring finger doesn't mean anything to me by itself, and that's why I question the $70K game salary for someone fresh out of MIT, unless the person has either done some amazing work at MIT or some interesting work extra-curricularly.
Engineers write code. Producers manage development, facilitating communications between different development disciplines, (art, code, design) and non-development disciplines (marketing, PR, sales, HR, admin, etc.). Producer is a pretty generic title and the roll can change drastically depending on company and rank (assistant producer, associate producer, line producer, producer, senior producer, exec producer), and whether the producer is on the development side or the publisher side. In Japan, producers tend to hold the "design vision" for the product, in the US that isn't necessarily the case.
Coders tend to make more than producers at all pay ranges, because being a producer requries being a generalist and there are simply more people able to do it than be great coders.
That all said, I call bullshit on a standard $70K job offer to a guy fresh out of MIT. One thing the game industry respects is shipping games, and no one is going to pay a jr. staffer $70K, esp. if they haven't shipped a game. (And frankly, especially if they've only got a degree from MIT, which seems to be heavy on theory, and light on the practical, low-levl, extremely efficient coding experience required for games.) That may be different for guys who've shipped significant or interesting side projects, or developed relevant technology. It may also be different for inexperience teams blowing VC money.
What makes you think they don't? I work at a game developer and probably hear 40 new game ideas a DAY. People constantly come up with ideas and bounce them off each other, looking for holes, seeing if there's a good nugget that can be used in an existing game or whatever. There's also practically a sport here: come up with a stupid concept and then figure out how to make a game out of it. (Anyone who wants to play the game version of My Dinner with Andre can email me.)
To me it's amazing the Tribune printed anything about the case, since it seems to omit any reporting on crime in Oakland... But I've voted in Alameda county since 2001, and I have no faith any of my votes have ever been counted. The incompetence of the poll workers, combined with the easily hackability / uselessness of the machines (one year I could have voted twice, in the same kiosk, with the same 'smart card') is just stunning. Not to get too local, but does anyone from SF know who makes those voting systems? As I recall, they switched from punch cards to a system where you draw a black line between two other black lines. An optical reader will reject any ballots where you vote >1 in a single race when you try to hand in the ballot. So, no "hanging chad" incidents, and a solid, unambigious, paper record of each vote.
FTR, It's not much worse, streaming, than the quality when I saw that on Super-8, or whatever audio/video film format they used in public schools in the 1970s and 1980s.
I found it irritating. If the guys were stealing beers from the magic fridge, the fridge hider guy -- miserly guarding his beer -- would probably notice and not do it anymore. So to me, that ad, while marginally and momentarily funny, presented a logical flaw that led me to despise it.
Woz one time said something like "way before I got rich, I learned to get stressed out about things." I think he's pretty happy. I think he enjoyed the pranks and fun of working at Apple as much as the engineering, and when it ceased to be fun, he just went on to other things. I think the US Festivals were as satisfying for him in some ways as the Apple II development, and his educational work has been really satisfying to him as well. I met Woz once in a social context, and got the impression that he got more of a kick and more satisfaction out of having a rad non-red laser pointer than a really driven perfectionist (like, say Steve Jobs) has received from, say, owning Pixar. Not at all saying Steve Jobs is unhappy (I have no idea), but Woz seems to be pretty happy.
The thing that's weird to me is that people who don't like WoW tend to complain that it isn't a real game, because you can easily be at a disadvantage to someone else, even if your skillz are better than theirs. Maybe we need to expand our definition of games, or realize that there can be more than one type of game, or more than one kind of electronic entertainment.
I'm playing an old-school console RPG right now (Legend of Heroes) and while it clearly requires no skill to complete beyond pushing the X button, the ability to read, and patience, that doesn't mean it isn't fun.
The problem isn't that the game rewards unethical behavior and real life doesn't -- if someone were to sleep with a professor in real life and get a better grade for it, they were rewarded as well. The problem is that in the Sims, it can't be some time later and the character suddenly feels a crushing sense of guilt about what a horrible person she's been, and you lose the game.
To be sure, some people successfully whore their way to the top (and not just with sex) without ever feeling guilt, but generally those people are spotted and despised by others, and don't have good long term prospects. The Sims doesn't model things to that degree (yet, anyway). Although it would be cool if it worked say 70% of the time, but 30% of the time you got expelled and had to settle for a worse career in the game.
For sure. One time (as an hourly tester), I got exclusive use of my own Mac II (this was in the stone age). So I wasted no time putting a cool "IBM sucks" startup screen on it, because I was a Mac guy.
Then the next day (literally) they used "my" Mac to give a demo... to IBM. When I got in, everyone in the tester pit told me about it and was like "dude, you're so fired." But my boss (who was a former Vietname tunnel rat and a very frightening guy) was totally cool about it. He was like "did you do this" and I was like "uh, yeah" and he was like "Right. Don't do that again. Anything you do at an office, everyone sees." That was it. That was a great lesson and probably has saved my ass a million times in the age of email. (Plus it taught me a great deal about how to treat others.)
Anyone who is halfway competant deserves at least one consequence-free fuckup at a given job.
Why did talking to the IRA work? Probably a lot of reasons, but clearly their para-militray strategy wasn't working, and ultimately, the IRA, and the people they nominally represented, wanted to live in peace.
If the people you're fighting don't want to live in peace, and have a win condition that involves you being dead, it's harder to talk, even if they don't see their armed conflict working out like they wanted.
We ended up at war as a consequence of an economc embargo of Japan? Excellent. Nice apology for Japanese agression!
Our embargo against Japan may have irritated them, and provided some political cover (to them) for their actions, but they certainly didn't think we were going to end the embargo after Pearl Harbor, did they? Therefore, it's an impossible excuse. Japan's military dictatorship was simply trying to eliminate our influence in the Pacific. It was an pure act of unbridled agression, and there are no mitigating circumstances for it.
Fair enough! Posting incorrect info, then having someone correct it, nastily, is part of what Slashdot is all about. Next time, I'll make more grammatical mistakes, so you can sink your teeth into something in the reply... Anyway, I'm happy to GFM while you STFU.
No, in fact, you don't remember the story correctly (maybe you should check before you post next time).
Ralph Baer created, documented, and patented the process for a Pong-like game well before Atari created and released Pong. Nolan Bushnell's Atari lost a court case that established the primacy of Magnavox's initial invention, gave Atari full rights to Pong-line games, and actually required Atari (not Magnavox) to go after other rip-offs. Oh, and Atari had to kick Magnavox some dough, of course.
According to Nolan, he had Al Alcorn create Pong as essentially a programming exercise, which may or may not be true, but it's immaterial to Ralph Baer's legitimate claim to have invented Pong (Nolan popularized videogames, and that's a fine legacy too). It is clear that Nolan had previously seen the Magnavox Pong, so he may have remembered the concept.
In any case, it wasn't trivial to build Pong, whether your were Ralph Baer, Nolan Bushnell, or Al Alcorn. Pong doesn't even have a CPU, it's just a state machine, and it's not something that was obvious or easy to do with the available (non-military) hardware of the early 70s.
So, frankly, STFU, before you start dissing on Ralph Baer, who is one of the most unsung, yet most important, contributers to the videogame age ever.
Then you take advantage of their "Come back to Netflix/BlockBuster" offers, which probably excempts you from thottling for a while to re-entice you to the service.
But to me, the real solution is to stop watching so many movies and read a book, which you can get free from a library.
It's probably a bad idea to lump all "Christians" into one and then make a bold claim about what they believe or do. Because last time I checked, the leader of the largest Christian sect in the US (Catholics), was totally down with evolution .
Anyway, you should probably speak more carefully, or you come off sounding like an uniformed, uneducated, bigoted, moron... (like your own stereotype of the worst kind of fundementalist Christian, by the way)
Re:No, Google is only dictating how you Do No Evil
on
Google Delists BMW-Germany
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Did you read the dude's blog? He comes off like a total power-tripping asshat; the exact type who'd invent a reason to delist any company he didn't like.
Google is getting progressively more invasive and irritating. It's already rolled over to China -- how long before other countries Google is sucking up to can just demand that certain sites be permanently delinked?
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't Microsoft manage to do this? They may have interior offices there, but it seems like most people have windows.
That doesn't at all mean that publishers are not trying to build new franchises, or that there aren't scrappy independents (a la the Darwinia guys), or famous rich dudes (a la Will Wright) making neat ideas.
The videogame industry is not a zero-sum game. The existence of sequels and licensed games does not preclude the existance innovative, experimental games. And in fact, the ratio of innovative titles (Katamari, Ico, Darwinina, Bridge Builder, Puzzle Pirates, etc) per year versus sequels and licensed games probably outpaces the ratio of quality new TV shows versus typical TV crap. Bottom line: you could only buy so-called "innovative" games and pick up at least a 12 - 15 console titles a year, never mind how many PC games you could buy. (Yeah, some of them may be failed experiments (Robot Alchemy Destruction, anyone?) but that's the chance you take when you buy experimental games.)
Frankly, that's a pretty good rate. If you buy 15 games a year you are well entrenched into the "hardcore" demographic.
Seriously, if Google ever flips its evil bit, we're all fucked.
But honestly, when you're there, you'd swear it was 15 million degrees Celcius, easy.
How many Smoots long was that bridge, anyway?
Right... except the PS1 crushed the N64 in the market, and the PS2 crushed the GameCube. So I'm not sure exactly what the advantage is at this point...
To you or me, it's obvious, but let's give credit when credit is due: after all the pointless, stupid, incorrect, negative articles about games, it's excellent to see some (well deserved) good press.
Of course, I've also met people from MIT who are brilliant and have built brilliant systems (and I work with some), but seeing a beaver on someone's ring finger doesn't mean anything to me by itself, and that's why I question the $70K game salary for someone fresh out of MIT, unless the person has either done some amazing work at MIT or some interesting work extra-curricularly.
Coders tend to make more than producers at all pay ranges, because being a producer requries being a generalist and there are simply more people able to do it than be great coders.
That all said, I call bullshit on a standard $70K job offer to a guy fresh out of MIT. One thing the game industry respects is shipping games, and no one is going to pay a jr. staffer $70K, esp. if they haven't shipped a game. (And frankly, especially if they've only got a degree from MIT, which seems to be heavy on theory, and light on the practical, low-levl, extremely efficient coding experience required for games.) That may be different for guys who've shipped significant or interesting side projects, or developed relevant technology. It may also be different for inexperience teams blowing VC money.
What makes you think they don't? I work at a game developer and probably hear 40 new game ideas a DAY. People constantly come up with ideas and bounce them off each other, looking for holes, seeing if there's a good nugget that can be used in an existing game or whatever. There's also practically a sport here: come up with a stupid concept and then figure out how to make a game out of it. (Anyone who wants to play the game version of My Dinner with Andre can email me.)
To me it's amazing the Tribune printed anything about the case, since it seems to omit any reporting on crime in Oakland... But I've voted in Alameda county since 2001, and I have no faith any of my votes have ever been counted. The incompetence of the poll workers, combined with the easily hackability / uselessness of the machines (one year I could have voted twice, in the same kiosk, with the same 'smart card') is just stunning. Not to get too local, but does anyone from SF know who makes those voting systems? As I recall, they switched from punch cards to a system where you draw a black line between two other black lines. An optical reader will reject any ballots where you vote >1 in a single race when you try to hand in the ballot. So, no "hanging chad" incidents, and a solid, unambigious, paper record of each vote.
FTR, It's not much worse, streaming, than the quality when I saw that on Super-8, or whatever audio/video film format they used in public schools in the 1970s and 1980s.
I found it irritating. If the guys were stealing beers from the magic fridge, the fridge hider guy -- miserly guarding his beer -- would probably notice and not do it anymore. So to me, that ad, while marginally and momentarily funny, presented a logical flaw that led me to despise it.
Woz one time said something like "way before I got rich, I learned to get stressed out about things." I think he's pretty happy. I think he enjoyed the pranks and fun of working at Apple as much as the engineering, and when it ceased to be fun, he just went on to other things. I think the US Festivals were as satisfying for him in some ways as the Apple II development, and his educational work has been really satisfying to him as well. I met Woz once in a social context, and got the impression that he got more of a kick and more satisfaction out of having a rad non-red laser pointer than a really driven perfectionist (like, say Steve Jobs) has received from, say, owning Pixar. Not at all saying Steve Jobs is unhappy (I have no idea), but Woz seems to be pretty happy.
I'm playing an old-school console RPG right now (Legend of Heroes) and while it clearly requires no skill to complete beyond pushing the X button, the ability to read, and patience, that doesn't mean it isn't fun.
To be sure, some people successfully whore their way to the top (and not just with sex) without ever feeling guilt, but generally those people are spotted and despised by others, and don't have good long term prospects. The Sims doesn't model things to that degree (yet, anyway). Although it would be cool if it worked say 70% of the time, but 30% of the time you got expelled and had to settle for a worse career in the game.
Then the next day (literally) they used "my" Mac to give a demo... to IBM. When I got in, everyone in the tester pit told me about it and was like "dude, you're so fired." But my boss (who was a former Vietname tunnel rat and a very frightening guy) was totally cool about it. He was like "did you do this" and I was like "uh, yeah" and he was like "Right. Don't do that again. Anything you do at an office, everyone sees." That was it. That was a great lesson and probably has saved my ass a million times in the age of email. (Plus it taught me a great deal about how to treat others.)
Anyone who is halfway competant deserves at least one consequence-free fuckup at a given job.
If the people you're fighting don't want to live in peace, and have a win condition that involves you being dead, it's harder to talk, even if they don't see their armed conflict working out like they wanted.
Our embargo against Japan may have irritated them, and provided some political cover (to them) for their actions, but they certainly didn't think we were going to end the embargo after Pearl Harbor, did they? Therefore, it's an impossible excuse. Japan's military dictatorship was simply trying to eliminate our influence in the Pacific. It was an pure act of unbridled agression, and there are no mitigating circumstances for it.
Fair enough! Posting incorrect info, then having someone correct it, nastily, is part of what Slashdot is all about. Next time, I'll make more grammatical mistakes, so you can sink your teeth into something in the reply... Anyway, I'm happy to GFM while you STFU.
Ralph Baer created, documented, and patented the process for a Pong-like game well before Atari created and released Pong. Nolan Bushnell's Atari lost a court case that established the primacy of Magnavox's initial invention, gave Atari full rights to Pong-line games, and actually required Atari (not Magnavox) to go after other rip-offs. Oh, and Atari had to kick Magnavox some dough, of course.
According to Nolan, he had Al Alcorn create Pong as essentially a programming exercise, which may or may not be true, but it's immaterial to Ralph Baer's legitimate claim to have invented Pong (Nolan popularized videogames, and that's a fine legacy too). It is clear that Nolan had previously seen the Magnavox Pong, so he may have remembered the concept.
In any case, it wasn't trivial to build Pong, whether your were Ralph Baer, Nolan Bushnell, or Al Alcorn. Pong doesn't even have a CPU, it's just a state machine, and it's not something that was obvious or easy to do with the available (non-military) hardware of the early 70s.
So, frankly, STFU, before you start dissing on Ralph Baer, who is one of the most unsung, yet most important, contributers to the videogame age ever.
But to me, the real solution is to stop watching so many movies and read a book, which you can get free from a library.
Anyway, you should probably speak more carefully, or you come off sounding like an uniformed, uneducated, bigoted, moron... (like your own stereotype of the worst kind of fundementalist Christian, by the way)
links to in-stock 360s, please?
Google is getting progressively more invasive and irritating. It's already rolled over to China -- how long before other countries Google is sucking up to can just demand that certain sites be permanently delinked?