I never said that it was a result of the Bush administration. What i think and implied (or at least was trying to) is that the Bush administration seems to believe in a mostly unregulated free-market (well, except for the part where they give kick-backs to the companies/industries they like of course) and thinks the US citizens should just suck up and deal with all the problems that result from it. And if you disagreed with them loudly enough to get noticed i'm sure they'd come up with something slanderous to say about you. Perhaps not literally that you're an un-american commie traitor, but that could quite likely be the underlying conotation.
The sarcasm just flew right over your head didn't it? Well _i_ was being sarcasting at least, as you said there are people who believe such nonsense, but ironically (or not) it's the same people who think that we should just bend over and accept all the bad stuff that comes with a free market, since "obviously" that's the only alternative we have, hence the "lose-lose" situation.
Good. If you want a free market you have to accept the consequences.
And if you don't want a 100% free market you're an un-patriotic un-american commie traitor? I'm sure that's what a lot Bush and a lot of his supporters would think anyways, so it seems like a lose-lose situation for the rest of us.
I'll tell you why not. I'm currently busy trying to find a cellphone/PDA combo that _doesn't_ have a keyboard. I want a PDA that i can use for just one thing, taking notes. Being able to import and read text files from other sources would be good to. I was a little worried about having to learn that special handwriting stroke thing, but then a friend of mine showed me her PDA, which had the option to bring up a virtual keyboard that you could type on using the stylus, which is good enough for me.
So why avoid the more high-tech keyboard type PDA/cellphones? Because they have a ton of functionality i don't need, and every time you add functionality you're sacrificing something else, usually price. Adding those stupid little keyboards is certainly increasing the price, increasing the size of the device, and often decreasing the screen size. The email and web functionality and all the other PC like aspects are certainly included in the cost as well. As a result in order to get the functionality i want it looks like i'd need to get a $500 or so cellphone when it could really be accomplished in the standard $200 cellphones. (Especially if they got rid of the stupid camera functionality, which i don't really want either.)
So that's why i'd really prefer an old fashioned, simple stylus style PDA. Because i don't want to pay extra, in both money and device real-estate, for functionality i don't really need.
It's not a "joining" of online and offline lives which is important, it's a consistency within your online life (or a subset thereof.) The article itself mentions the difference between the two.
The anonymity between your online and offline life can be important. If i'm a gay-leather-fetishist or a homophobic-neo-nazi i may want to be able to express myself online without having to deal with the negative social repercusions in my real life, and i think that's an important aspect of the net that we shouldn't get rid of. However the members of those two online communities want to be sure that someone who shows up in a new forum (in the figuartive sense) is actually a member of their community and not a troll from the other one. Therefore what's needed is a way to build up a social context to "prove" your online identity is real. People who were concerned about who they admited to certain forums online could restrict them to people who had such cohesive identies and had shown themselves to be trustworthy. And of course if you're using such an idenitiy you can't spout the first thing that comes to mind without worrying about the social consequences.
Of course there would still be nothing stopping someone from taking the time to build up a false online idenitiy, or maintain two or more different online identities, but there's really not much stopping people from doing that in real life either. Nothing is perfect afterall.
I am not so sure I trust Google anymore. I would think they would have no problems censoring based on government request.
And you're basing this on what? Google seemed to have no difficulty standing up to the US government when it requested information from them. There are probably a lot of things you could criticize Google for, but a lack of willingness to stand up to the US government in defense of their legal rights has so far not been one of them.
The $900 figure was an analysts estimate of the build cost.
However that was the same analyst's estimate that was predicting their ship date was going to slip. If Sony felt it was necessary to deny one aspect of that report why didn't they say anything about the other? Maybe they just feel that the ship date is the foremost issue in consumers' minds, but it makes you wonder.
In a way it makes sense. They wouldn't have gotten so big today if they weren't doing something right in the first place. They gained their original capital by making games that people actually wanted to buy (without the brandname to rely on and the oodles of marketing they can spend now) which allowed them to make all the acquisitons which have led to them becoming the behemoth they are today.
As is described in more detail by the Snopes article on the "curse" that seems to follow football stars featured on Chunky Soup can labels, if you pick out a particular person, company, whatever, and laud them for their excelence, it is only because they are performing above the mean in whatever merits you're observing compared to their peers. No one comments about companies who have always performed poorly, "oh how the mildly pathetic have become even worse." And once you've become the best there's only one other place to go. You can strive to remain the best as long as possible but eventually you will fail in that goal.
Of course there's always the question of whether you fail because you can no longer remain (as) competitive or through some kind of explicitly self-destructive action. Or whether that failure is of a financial or PR nature. Nintendo made what are, in retrospect, some obvious blunders and dropped from #1 in the console industry to a distant second, but have still remained a company that makes quality products and still turns a profit (though perhaps not as much as in their heyday.) EA on the other hand has become even more successfull financially, but at the cost of adopting policies that have made a lot of people regard them and their games unfavorably.
Why are you so concerned about thresholds and determining relations?
First of all, if the game is well designed you'll be able to see your racquet in the game, along with the ball. Mentally translating the relationship between the ball and the racquet from the (possibly) third person perspective you're watching to the first person perspective you're controlling might take some adjustment, but it's something that gamers have been doing forever, i think we can handle it.
As for thresholds, why do you seem to think they'd exist? The Rev controller is supposed to detect position, pitch and yaw. There's no special combo you're going to have to enter to hit the ball, you just hold it like you were holding a racquet and swing. The racquet will (hopefully) hit the ball at a certain angle and speed, and from that point on it's just physics.
Of course that's not necessarily the kind of tennis game _i_ want to play, since i don't know how to actually play tennis. I'd probably want something more like what you describe towards the end. However for those who want a more realistic game i'm not sure what the difficulty would be.
Oh yeah, i'm going to love all the inevitable news stories that will crop up after the first one of those that lets you pull over the perp and then switch the controller over to "club mode."
I can't read the article since i'm at work, but is the blurb correct in that they're just basing this prediction off of the sales numbers for the last two years? Certainly sales numbers are important, but they're certainly not the _only_ factor. I would be very surprised if sales numbers for consoles haven't ever experienced unexpected dips or rises based on the particular games released for them or because of other unpredictable factors.
That said i wouldn't be suprised either if the general prediction turns out to be true given the number of brain dead americans who will buy a console just because it has the games where you get to go around shooting cops, proving that it is "cool" and not "kiddie." This will of course be followed by multidunious boasts about how Nintendo is the teh lozer, even if the sales figures for the DS are still higher on a worldwide basis.
And why assume that the reader will only look at the score from your review? perhaps the reader is actually interested in the detailed information you provide and click on a link to your site from the aggregation site? And then the aggregation site will actually benfit the reviewer, not go against him.
When i'm thinking about going to a somewhat iffy movie i'll check out RottenTomatoes and see what aggregate score it got. Then i'll look over the blurbs, keeping an eye out for any reviewers i tend to agree with. And if the movie has a generally negative rating i'll check out the negative reviews to see _why_ they didn't like it.
For example i was trying to decide whether to go see Underworld Evolution, at the time i checked RottenTomatoes there were only a couple reviews up and almost all rotten. However i noticed the following blurb: "Stylish, but doesn't really re-imagine the vampire genre, cluttering the screen with creatures that no longer shock or surprise us. It's also a bit too long to pack a mean punch."
Okay, i liked the first cause it had lots of werewolves and vampires beating up on each other and a cute girl wearing cool outfits, and i actually like longer movies. So the review was negative but for reasons that completly didn't apply to me, in fact the only part that really interested me was the one positive comment, that it was "stylish." So i went and saw it and was happy with the results. It was a fun werewolves and vampires beat up on each other movie with a cute girl in it.
Presumably if game reviewers write well thought out reviews that explain _why_ they liked or disliked a game then the same process will happen there once the situation settles down. People will look at the aggregate scores, but they'll also look at what their favorite viewers have to say and they'll look at why the negative reviewers didn't like it. Some people complained about Shadow of the Collossus being too short, but given that i don't have as much time as i like to play video games that's not really a huge concern to me. I go the game, enjoyed beating up the first four or so Colossi (while feeling sorry for them at the same time of course) and then got distracted with other games i got for christmas. Clearly that particular criticisim wasn't relevant to me but knowing what the criticism was was important.
The DS could definately benefit from a redesign: it needs more than just the traditional directional pad, and could be much easier to hold. The current design causes my hand to hurt after a short amount of time.
Doesn't cause me any problem and i play for hours at a time, but we're all built different i guess.
I suppose an analog stick might be a good thing, presuming they could make it work right. I'm really not sure how to stick an analog stick on a handheld without messing something up. The PSP has one doesn't it? How well does that work?
What _i'd_ really like to see are some improvements to the software/hardware interface. There should be a way to turn the backlight on and off without rebooting your system to get to the main menu. There should also be a way to display the time on top of whatever game you're playing. (Presumably just for a second or two so you could pause and check the time and then go back to playing, but i suppose having a way to leave it up in the corner all the time wouldn't be a bad thing either.)
And if they were _really_ amazing they'd figure out how to shrink it down to something approaching the GBASP size so it would fit in my pocket easily, but given all the stuff they have to fit in that probably isn't possible.
Hmmm, it doesn't seem to mention Thrill Kill, which is the only rare game i happen to own. (Though it's kind of hard to tell since the article is spread out over so many pages.) Not that i've ever actually played it on my own machine, i've yet to get around to acquiring a modded PSX or PS2.
The stores would do marginally better, but probably not enough so to make it worth fighting it out with the manufacturers. If the "breakage" theory is true, and i expect it probably is, manufacturers must by _much_ more willing to offer rebates than to give a direct discount to the retailers.
I don't think the video game industry is capable of a crash at this point, or even much of a shake-down. Even if the next generation of game consoles and the games themselves are seriously underwhelming, the industry is at a point where it could weather the storm for a while.
You're missing several of the points of an article. Mainly that the first "crash" wasn't necessarily a crash and that whetever you choose to call it there has been more than one such event. To paraphrase the article, a crash is when the bottom of the market falls out, a shake-down/out is when those companies that are ill-prepared take a tumble. Even if the three big companies you list survive with little or no difficulty it has no bearing on whether or not there was a shakeout. In fact the article claims that the reason why no one really noticed the second big shakeout was because the big companies _did_ survive.
Because ten years after The Great Shake-Out, the same damned thing happened again. But this time, the big companies didn't get scared -- they rode it out.
...
And then there was a shakeout. Just because Nintendo didn't go under doesn't mean there wasn't one.
3D0 fell apart, and there went a lot of money down the drain for Panasonic, Magnavox, and Goldstar, who all quickly exited the console arena.
And note that the companies they specifically mention as having already failed or being at risk for the current/upcoming shakeout only includes one of the big three, and that one they concede may be able to pull through:
But guess what? "Handheld convergence device" is the new "multimedia set-top box"!
And like clockwork they are collapsing. Tapwave? Gone. N-Gage? Gone. Gizmondo? Close to it. And did you read yesterday's post in which (super duper) Gary Cooper pointed out that even the PSP is going to disappoint?
This is not to say that Sony won't do fine with PSP -- after all, theirs was the one "multimedia console" that came out of the wreckage of 1994 to actually succeed (and how)!
Unfortunatly Ebert is one of the few big name critics who will consistently give a thumbs up to well done cartoons and anime. If we can't convince _him_ that games are art then how are we supposed to convince the _real_ art snobs?
The bits you quote make it sound like it's going to be more like a Tales game or a Star Ocean game than an FF game =/ Not that those are bad, but i'd really like to play another _FF_ game.
Sorry, i've never heard of Israel other than as the name of the country and/or the people, and i've never heard anyone suggesting Yahweh had a wife other than the historical speculation that he used to be part of a pantheon before. Since you said Jesus was the son of Israel did it not make sense to think that Israel was another name for Mary?
As i've said before, i took the class years ago and there's no way i can remember the specifics. In general it was the usual things you'd expect to find in archeological digs, pottery shards and walls and anything else they tended to put writing on back then. I asked someone who took the class with me and she happened to remember the name of the textbook we used, so if you're really that interested go check out The Bible and the Ancient Near East. There were also some additional references we used, but the textbook should hopefully have most of it.
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I never said that it was a result of the Bush administration. What i think and implied (or at least was trying to) is that the Bush administration seems to believe in a mostly unregulated free-market (well, except for the part where they give kick-backs to the companies/industries they like of course) and thinks the US citizens should just suck up and deal with all the problems that result from it. And if you disagreed with them loudly enough to get noticed i'm sure they'd come up with something slanderous to say about you. Perhaps not literally that you're an un-american commie traitor, but that could quite likely be the underlying conotation.
I'm not sure if the dukenukem tag on the article should be modded "funny" or "flamebait" :)
The sarcasm just flew right over your head didn't it? Well _i_ was being sarcasting at least, as you said there are people who believe such nonsense, but ironically (or not) it's the same people who think that we should just bend over and accept all the bad stuff that comes with a free market, since "obviously" that's the only alternative we have, hence the "lose-lose" situation.
And if you don't want a 100% free market you're an un-patriotic un-american commie traitor? I'm sure that's what a lot Bush and a lot of his supporters would think anyways, so it seems like a lose-lose situation for the rest of us.
So why avoid the more high-tech keyboard type PDA/cellphones? Because they have a ton of functionality i don't need, and every time you add functionality you're sacrificing something else, usually price. Adding those stupid little keyboards is certainly increasing the price, increasing the size of the device, and often decreasing the screen size. The email and web functionality and all the other PC like aspects are certainly included in the cost as well. As a result in order to get the functionality i want it looks like i'd need to get a $500 or so cellphone when it could really be accomplished in the standard $200 cellphones. (Especially if they got rid of the stupid camera functionality, which i don't really want either.)
So that's why i'd really prefer an old fashioned, simple stylus style PDA. Because i don't want to pay extra, in both money and device real-estate, for functionality i don't really need.
Perhaps, but in comparison to the original DS...
The anonymity between your online and offline life can be important. If i'm a gay-leather-fetishist or a homophobic-neo-nazi i may want to be able to express myself online without having to deal with the negative social repercusions in my real life, and i think that's an important aspect of the net that we shouldn't get rid of. However the members of those two online communities want to be sure that someone who shows up in a new forum (in the figuartive sense) is actually a member of their community and not a troll from the other one. Therefore what's needed is a way to build up a social context to "prove" your online identity is real. People who were concerned about who they admited to certain forums online could restrict them to people who had such cohesive identies and had shown themselves to be trustworthy. And of course if you're using such an idenitiy you can't spout the first thing that comes to mind without worrying about the social consequences.
Of course there would still be nothing stopping someone from taking the time to build up a false online idenitiy, or maintain two or more different online identities, but there's really not much stopping people from doing that in real life either. Nothing is perfect afterall.
In fact, forget the internet!
And you're basing this on what? Google seemed to have no difficulty standing up to the US government when it requested information from them. There are probably a lot of things you could criticize Google for, but a lack of willingness to stand up to the US government in defense of their legal rights has so far not been one of them.
However that was the same analyst's estimate that was predicting their ship date was going to slip. If Sony felt it was necessary to deny one aspect of that report why didn't they say anything about the other? Maybe they just feel that the ship date is the foremost issue in consumers' minds, but it makes you wonder.
In a way it makes sense. They wouldn't have gotten so big today if they weren't doing something right in the first place. They gained their original capital by making games that people actually wanted to buy (without the brandname to rely on and the oodles of marketing they can spend now) which allowed them to make all the acquisitons which have led to them becoming the behemoth they are today.
As is described in more detail by the Snopes article on the "curse" that seems to follow football stars featured on Chunky Soup can labels, if you pick out a particular person, company, whatever, and laud them for their excelence, it is only because they are performing above the mean in whatever merits you're observing compared to their peers. No one comments about companies who have always performed poorly, "oh how the mildly pathetic have become even worse." And once you've become the best there's only one other place to go. You can strive to remain the best as long as possible but eventually you will fail in that goal.
Of course there's always the question of whether you fail because you can no longer remain (as) competitive or through some kind of explicitly self-destructive action. Or whether that failure is of a financial or PR nature. Nintendo made what are, in retrospect, some obvious blunders and dropped from #1 in the console industry to a distant second, but have still remained a company that makes quality products and still turns a profit (though perhaps not as much as in their heyday.) EA on the other hand has become even more successfull financially, but at the cost of adopting policies that have made a lot of people regard them and their games unfavorably.
First of all, if the game is well designed you'll be able to see your racquet in the game, along with the ball. Mentally translating the relationship between the ball and the racquet from the (possibly) third person perspective you're watching to the first person perspective you're controlling might take some adjustment, but it's something that gamers have been doing forever, i think we can handle it.
As for thresholds, why do you seem to think they'd exist? The Rev controller is supposed to detect position, pitch and yaw. There's no special combo you're going to have to enter to hit the ball, you just hold it like you were holding a racquet and swing. The racquet will (hopefully) hit the ball at a certain angle and speed, and from that point on it's just physics.
Of course that's not necessarily the kind of tennis game _i_ want to play, since i don't know how to actually play tennis. I'd probably want something more like what you describe towards the end. However for those who want a more realistic game i'm not sure what the difficulty would be.
Oh yeah, i'm going to love all the inevitable news stories that will crop up after the first one of those that lets you pull over the perp and then switch the controller over to "club mode."
That said i wouldn't be suprised either if the general prediction turns out to be true given the number of brain dead americans who will buy a console just because it has the games where you get to go around shooting cops, proving that it is "cool" and not "kiddie." This will of course be followed by multidunious boasts about how Nintendo is the teh lozer, even if the sales figures for the DS are still higher on a worldwide basis.
When i'm thinking about going to a somewhat iffy movie i'll check out RottenTomatoes and see what aggregate score it got. Then i'll look over the blurbs, keeping an eye out for any reviewers i tend to agree with. And if the movie has a generally negative rating i'll check out the negative reviews to see _why_ they didn't like it.
For example i was trying to decide whether to go see Underworld Evolution, at the time i checked RottenTomatoes there were only a couple reviews up and almost all rotten. However i noticed the following blurb: "Stylish, but doesn't really re-imagine the vampire genre, cluttering the screen with creatures that no longer shock or surprise us. It's also a bit too long to pack a mean punch."
Okay, i liked the first cause it had lots of werewolves and vampires beating up on each other and a cute girl wearing cool outfits, and i actually like longer movies. So the review was negative but for reasons that completly didn't apply to me, in fact the only part that really interested me was the one positive comment, that it was "stylish." So i went and saw it and was happy with the results. It was a fun werewolves and vampires beat up on each other movie with a cute girl in it.
Presumably if game reviewers write well thought out reviews that explain _why_ they liked or disliked a game then the same process will happen there once the situation settles down. People will look at the aggregate scores, but they'll also look at what their favorite viewers have to say and they'll look at why the negative reviewers didn't like it. Some people complained about Shadow of the Collossus being too short, but given that i don't have as much time as i like to play video games that's not really a huge concern to me. I go the game, enjoyed beating up the first four or so Colossi (while feeling sorry for them at the same time of course) and then got distracted with other games i got for christmas. Clearly that particular criticisim wasn't relevant to me but knowing what the criticism was was important.
Doesn't cause me any problem and i play for hours at a time, but we're all built different i guess.
I suppose an analog stick might be a good thing, presuming they could make it work right. I'm really not sure how to stick an analog stick on a handheld without messing something up. The PSP has one doesn't it? How well does that work?
What _i'd_ really like to see are some improvements to the software/hardware interface. There should be a way to turn the backlight on and off without rebooting your system to get to the main menu. There should also be a way to display the time on top of whatever game you're playing. (Presumably just for a second or two so you could pause and check the time and then go back to playing, but i suppose having a way to leave it up in the corner all the time wouldn't be a bad thing either.)
And if they were _really_ amazing they'd figure out how to shrink it down to something approaching the GBASP size so it would fit in my pocket easily, but given all the stuff they have to fit in that probably isn't possible.
Hmmm, it doesn't seem to mention Thrill Kill, which is the only rare game i happen to own. (Though it's kind of hard to tell since the article is spread out over so many pages.) Not that i've ever actually played it on my own machine, i've yet to get around to acquiring a modded PSX or PS2.
The stores would do marginally better, but probably not enough so to make it worth fighting it out with the manufacturers. If the "breakage" theory is true, and i expect it probably is, manufacturers must by _much_ more willing to offer rebates than to give a direct discount to the retailers.
I don't remember exactly, but it must have been better than the one from which you acquired your sense of humor :)
You're missing several of the points of an article. Mainly that the first "crash" wasn't necessarily a crash and that whetever you choose to call it there has been more than one such event. To paraphrase the article, a crash is when the bottom of the market falls out, a shake-down/out is when those companies that are ill-prepared take a tumble. Even if the three big companies you list survive with little or no difficulty it has no bearing on whether or not there was a shakeout. In fact the article claims that the reason why no one really noticed the second big shakeout was because the big companies _did_ survive.
Because ten years after The Great Shake-Out, the same damned thing happened again. But this time, the big companies didn't get scared -- they rode it out.
And then there was a shakeout. Just because Nintendo didn't go under doesn't mean there wasn't one.
3D0 fell apart, and there went a lot of money down the drain for Panasonic, Magnavox, and Goldstar, who all quickly exited the console arena.
And note that the companies they specifically mention as having already failed or being at risk for the current/upcoming shakeout only includes one of the big three, and that one they concede may be able to pull through:
But guess what? "Handheld convergence device" is the new "multimedia set-top box"!
And like clockwork they are collapsing. Tapwave? Gone. N-Gage? Gone. Gizmondo? Close to it. And did you read yesterday's post in which (super duper) Gary Cooper pointed out that even the PSP is going to disappoint?
This is not to say that Sony won't do fine with PSP -- after all, theirs was the one "multimedia console" that came out of the wreckage of 1994 to actually succeed (and how)!
Unfortunatly Ebert is one of the few big name critics who will consistently give a thumbs up to well done cartoons and anime. If we can't convince _him_ that games are art then how are we supposed to convince the _real_ art snobs?
And also, even _without_ adjusting for inflation 60 is still less than 70.
The bits you quote make it sound like it's going to be more like a Tales game or a Star Ocean game than an FF game =/ Not that those are bad, but i'd really like to play another _FF_ game.
As i've said before, i took the class years ago and there's no way i can remember the specifics. In general it was the usual things you'd expect to find in archeological digs, pottery shards and walls and anything else they tended to put writing on back then. I asked someone who took the class with me and she happened to remember the name of the textbook we used, so if you're really that interested go check out The Bible and the Ancient Near East. There were also some additional references we used, but the textbook should hopefully have most of it.
You mean like this?