Typically, conservatives are more likely to shoot the guy who tried burgling his house.
Only a certain subset of conservatives are gun nuts. Most of the conservatives i know in orange county are the spoiled rich types who think the world was made to serve them just because they were born into a rich family, and i don't think most of them have guns.
No, more likely they'll continue to only reject patents owned by individuals when they annoy a multibillion dollar corporation
Well at least now we've figured out that damn middle step.
1. File an obvious patent.
2. Sue a small company with few lawyers for patent infringement.
3. Profit!!!
vs.
1. File an obvious patent.
2. Sue a ginormous company with tons of lawyers for patent infringement.
3. Get your patent invalidated by the patent office!!!
Here's a quick test. Ask the user if they've ever heard of SpyBot or AdAware. If the answer is unsatisfactory, they've got spyware. That includes your mom.
5% is WAY low. Even I got infected (an app on tucows was listed as freeware, but turned out to be ad/spyware), even if you don't coun't cookies and GUIDs..
Here's a quicker test. Ask the user if they've ever heard of SpyBot or AdAware. Now ignore their answer, they've got spyware.
Let's see, i ran AdAware this morning because i got a pretty nasty infection. Let's see what has accumulated in the 12 hours since them.
21 Objects.
1 Process, 7 registry keys, 4 registry values, 7 files, 2 folders. I seem to be getting "JRaun" a lot.
I'm not really suprised, and i use netscape about 95% of the time.
I really do hope that they include the hardrive... It is the only reason i would buy a game console, otherwise you have to pay hundreds of dollars in accessories, and it adds general value to the console. It would be a typical microsoft move to not incorperate it.
Hundreds of dollars? Exactly how many memory cards do you buy? They're only $15 or $20 each i think, certainly not hundreds.
Or is there some other accessory you think a built in hard drive replaces? An add-on hard drive certainly, but it's not that much cheaper to get in included that to buy it after the fact. Why do you think the Xbox is so much more expensive?
One could consider it good or bad though, on one hand videogames being judged by a group well versed in making these types of judgements is defintely a plus, but on the otherhand this group probably doesn't have experience with games and dealing with their level of interactivity....
Some would even argue about their competency to judge films.
I seem to remember that a few years ago there was some artsy type film that involved some females talking to each other about their sex lives. No actualy sex, just talking about it, and the MPAA wanted to rate it NC-17.
Ok, after five minutes of Googling i think i have it narrowed down:
"And some suspect that the MPAA rates films about female sexuality tougher than those focusing on men. For example, an independent teen comedy called Coming Soon that was a hit at the Seattle International Film Festival has had trouble finding a domestic distributor (20th Century Fox bought international rights) after being rated NC-17. The film, which is about three teenage girls who talk frankly about sex and their interest in it, contains no nudity and no violence. The filmmaker has said that when she accused the board of having a gender-based double standard she was told that the board was merely reflecting the mores of the nation."
My guess is that MSN performs the search in any case, probes the first hits in their cache with some porn-detection algorithm, and redirects you if the algorithm thinks it might be porn.
Not only have people pointed out all the variants of XFree86 that work, but if you put in "porn" you get the porn warning. So far so good. However if you put in "porn porn" you don't get the warning, and the first sight returned is "blowjob pictures!!!" followed by "pornstar pictures!!!" and etc.
I don't think i've read much by Jack Vance, but i've read read pleanty of books with complex characters, and some of them were well before Donaldson's time. Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, Herbert's Dune, George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, Robin Hobb's Liveship Traders series, and i'm sure i could think of more if i went and looked through my bookshelves.
If there are examples of complex characters before and afterwards, i'm not sure if Donaldson deserves credit for anything.
THe entire point was you weren't supposed to like him. You went through the entire series deciding wether you should cheer him on, or hate him for being a rapist. The fact he never forgave himself for it only adds to that.
The problem was that i got the not liking him part just fine, but it was never even a question of whether to cheer him on or hate him, i just hated him. I wanted him to stop whining and being pathetic for awhile, and then i just kind of wanted him to die and get it over with.
In my mind whatever redeeming qualities he had were ovewhelmed by all his negative ones. There wasn't enough to like, and he was too pathetic to make hating him interesting.
As far as i can remember about the books ten years after the fact, his biggest problem was his pasivity. He didn't really do much, he just stumbled through the world. His most decisive action (with the possible exception of the ending, which i don't remember too well since i'd lost interest by that point) was the one which i hated him the most for.
I was also annoyed by the implication that guys have these urges, you know? And if they can't resist those urges and go and rape someone, well, it's not right, but it's understandable. Boys will be boys you know? And didn't she end up deciding she loved him later or something like that? *gag*
Lets go for something a little less kiddie than Eddings. If a director could get the main character right, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever by Donaldson would be good. Although I'll be happy with damn near anything that doesn't go the Xena/Hercules route.
Well i'd be happy with anything that wasn't The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I managed to drag myself all the way through the first trilogy and definitely wasn't impressed, but i gave up half-way through the first book of the second trilogy when it became aparent that it was going to be as lackluster as the first trilogy. Covenant was too whiney and annoying to be a good hero, and too pathetic to be a good anti-hero. Of course the fact that the first thing he does is rape a girl because he can't restrain his "manly urges" didn't really endear him to me.
Mirror of Her Dreams on the other hand was very good, wouldn't mind seeing a movie of that one, although there are other books i would nominate first.
you could always outsource the engine work... unless you think thats culturally biased too;)
That would fall under the rubric of outsourcing programmers. I don't know how companies that buy game engines handle it, either they have a contract with the original company to get some changes made, in which case you've got the same communication issues, or they have access to the source code as part of the agreement and have their own coders to make whatever changes they want, in which case they've reduced the number of programmers they need (possibly,) but certainly not eliminated them.
Given that one of the companies i was thinking of applying to recently said they wanted programmers experienced with Lithtech (an engine sold by Monolith) to write game code, i'm guessing that it's the later approach.
if you're into overdone deisgn docs, you could probably outsource the non-core design team, though I'd question moving the writing of dialog for a completely different country etc;)
Which parts are you saying should get outsourced? Like you said the game text shouldn't be outsourced, and clearly you don't want to outsource the basic game idea unless you're outsourcing everything. Outsourcing things affecting game play is a really bad idea. When i was working at an EA subsidiary that did RTSs, they had subcontracted to a company in England to do one of the games based on the franchise. When the game was getting close to ship date they were _still_ having serious trouble getting it balanced, so management decided to fly two or three of our best designers out there to fix it for them. They spent a week or two in England fixing all the problems. And note that these same people had been trying to help them from California through email for at least several weeks prior, but the difficulties in doing so were too severe for them to make much progress on the issue, hence the decision to fly them there where they could deal with things first hand and be more effective.
So it seems that game play issues are something that companies prefer to spend extra money on to get good results, which makes me doubt they'll be a target of outsourcing.
If there is some element of design that is so unimportant that it could be feasibly outsourced, i expect the company will consider just getting rid of it before they consider incuring the disadvantages of outsourcing.
mho what they should do is that they should bring in an outsider(always a different one!) in once a month to take a look at what they got going on and tell them bluntly if it doesn't make any sense or is stupid, frustrating or otherwise sucking(inside testers are too involved, and can't see if something 'just sucks' because they've seen it from the ground up or are afraid to say that it sucks). it often looks that the developers have gotten 'blind' from being too close to the project(and as such the end product ends up having some stupid shit that could have easily been fixed, like lacking keyboard configuration, having frustrating controls, bad camera view and so on).
I agree, that can be a very good thing, but only if you take what the outsider says with a grain of salt. The last game i worked on they decided in the last month or two that it was really lacking, so they brought in someone from another area of the company who hadn't dealt with the game before.
He had a LOT of suggestions. Some of the suggestions were really good, and some of them sucked. However since he had been brought in to make suggestions we were under orders from on high to try to implement all of his ideas.
Overall the game probably improved because of his input, but it would have been even better if we'd ignored half of what he said. He was especially worried about the dificulty of the game. He insisted that we add all kinds of changes to make the game easier and implement them at all difficulty levels. He was afraid that if we didn't some reviewer would start playing the game at the most difficult setting and think it was too hard and give it a bad review. The only thing he would let us change was the HP/damage ratios, so we bumped those up a lot for the most difficult level and hoped that would compensate. (Some of the reviews still complained about how easy the game was, so at best it was only a partial success)
In one level there were turrets that were supposed to track the player which he didn't think were good enough. He suggested we should make changes A, B, C, and D, all of which were fairly reasonable. I worked on it and told him that we had A, B and C, and something that was similar to D, but not exactly what he wanted. (He wanted circles of light to follow the targeting lasers around whever they struck an object, and all the consoles are limited in how many lights they can calculate at one time. The best i could come up with in the time available was to have sparks shooting out of wherever the lasers hit.) His response was that if we couldn't have all four, we should just yank the turrets out. We did so, despite how much improved the new turrets were over the old ones, and it made that level way too simple afterwards, but we didn't have the time to rework it.
It would have helped if we'd started the whole process of getting outside input earlier so that we weren't quite as rushed, but it wouldn't have fixed the whole problem. It can be difficult to try and fairly judge the suggestions of someone on something you've been working on for months and they've been playing for a few days or weeks, but it's better than accepting what they say on blind faith. _Everyone_ has some good ideas, some ideas that are good in theory but suck in practice, and some ideas that just suck. This ratio improves for professional developers (or so we like to think) but no one is ever compeltly free of dumb ideas.
Actually game developers are probably insulated more than many other industries from the dangers of outsourcing.
Games are art, more specifically they are art of the same kind as books and movies in that they have a strong cultural bias. Paintings and music are also culturally baiased, but they're much more open to apprecation by members of other cultures. Video games, books and movies all tend to make assumptions about the backgrounds and experiences of the audience that are necessary to fully understand the work.
Sure, EA could set up a team in India to develop games for a lot cheaper than a team in the US or Japan, but the resulting games probably wouldn't sell very well. Even games transfered between the US and Japan tend not to sell very well statistically speaking (and i say this as an american who likes Japanese RPGs, but i know i'm part of a small group.) Companies in one country have tried to design games that they thought would appeal to the other, and as often as not they have bombed. I believe Final Fantasy Mystic Quest was one such experiment.
So in order for the game to have decent odds of selling well in the targeted area, the designers need to be from the targeted area or an area that has close cultural ties, such as US and the UK.
Ok, so keep the designers in america, and ship everyone else off to India. There are probably people capable of doing the work in India, but you'll run into another problem. Designers frequently don't know what the hell they're doing. I appologize to any designers out there reading this, but all the ones i've worked with know it's true. The programmers will write some tool for the designers to use, and the designers will get lost and come to us for help. We'll tell them how to do that, and they'll be fine for a few days until they run into another problem. Sometimes the problem will be something they can deal with if they just learn the scripting lanague or whatever the issue is, sometimes it will be something new that we need to implement, and sometimes it will be something we told them to do or not to do weeks earlier. They'll do A and complain that the enemy does blah, and we'll tell them that they can't do A, they have to do B or C instead. Then they'll come back a week later saying if they do A, the enemy does blah. You'll explain again, and they'll say "Oh yeah, you told me that before didn't you?" Designers just seem to think differently than programmers, which is why designers are designers and programmer are programmers i suppose.
So if you attempt to outsource the programmers, you're going to run into huge communication difficulties between them and the designers, both in terms of developing what the designers want and explaining to them what they're doing wrong. You'll have possible langauge barriers, time delays from emailing back and forth across multiple time zones, the difficulty of not being able to actually _show_ the other person what you're talking about, etc. The reason why companies frequently have onsite QA even when there's an offsite QA team is because often you can't figure out what the offsite QA team is talking about just based on the write-up they email you. You either need to fiddle around for it for a long time yourself, or have local QA spend the time reproducing it and then show you.
There are similar issues between artists and programmers, and i imagine there are also issues like that between designers and artists. If you seperate any section from the others you're going to introduce masive delays and complications to the project.
The only area that i've seen effectively outsourced is sound. However it's interesting to note that the only company i worked for which had it's own in house sound department was frequently cited for the quality of the sound effects in the reviews of the games. And this is just with outsourcing the sound to another american person or group, even within the same state.
So yes, they could save money if they outsourced the labor to India, but if they only out-sou
Metroid Prime is ok but it's not a decent FPS, without AAA fps' I just don't see how gamecube can appeal to gamers over 10.
I'm 28, and am quite happy with my GameCube and PS2. I don't really care much for FPS, and really don't see your logic in apparently claiming that all people over 10 are primarily interested in FPS. The fact that THE must have title for the Xbox is a FPS is perhaps my #2 or #3 reason for being completly underwhelmed by Microsoft's console.
I've played some FPSs at work on PC (Counterstrike, some version of Doom, Battlefield 1942) and i've tried out a few FPSs on consoles, and i can't figure why anyone would ever choose consoles as their FPS vehicle of choice, regardless of how much or how little they were interested in the genre.
As for "most of the games listed as great games for the PS2 and GameCube are available for Dreamcast," care to back that up? Out of the thirty odd games i listed for GameCube earlier in this dicusion, i seriously doubt more than 10% or 20% are available on Dreamcast, which hardly qualifies as "most." In fact the only ones i can think of right now are Skies of Arcadia and Ikuraga, but go ahead, prove me wrong.
Why is it that whenever Nintendo zealots give their list of games, they include every single game Nintendo has ever made? Is Nintendo REALLY 100% infallible, that every title they have ever produced is SO great that everyone 'must own' it?
I don't have any idea if i listed "every single game Nintendo has ever made," (though i seriously doubt it) and i don't really care. I listed all the GameCube games i could think of that i consider to be of superior quality. A lot of those are first or second party games, but that doesn't make them any less fun.
If _you_ are so concerned about whether Nintendo has produced any duds, why don't _you_ go out and do some research on it? I wouldn't be suprised if Nintendo has produced one or more games that were less than stellar, however if we try to turn this into a comparison of crappy games on each platform we're going to be buried by the reams of listings.
Why is it that whenever anti-Nintendo zealots open their mouths they tend to hyperbolize? "There aren't even ten great GameCube games," "you always include every single game Nintendo has ever made."
but can you name 10 games that are must owns for every gamecube owner?
Metroid Prime
Eternal Darkness
Super Smash Brothers Melee
Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker
Viewtiful Joe
Super Monkey Ball
Pikmin
Animal Crossing
Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles
Mario Kart Double Dash
Mario Party
Super Mario Sunshine
Mario Golf
F-Zero GX
Rogue Squadron
Ikaruga
Pac-Man vs.
Star Fox Adventures
Wario Ware
Oooops, went over ten, sorry. There are also some games available for multiple systems, or that aren't quite out yet.
Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes
Tales of Symphonia
Prince of Persia
Beyond Good and Evil
Resident Evil
Lord of the Rings
Spider-Man
Harvest Moon
Skies of Arcadia
Soul Caliber II
SSX 3
The Simpsons Hit & Run
I'm not even including several cases of multiple games from the same series. (I don't count Mario Kart, Mario Party, etc as being the same series.)
There's probably a lot more than i'm forgetting about, especially in the action and sports genres which i don't play very much.
There's been a similar editorial (although shorter and less detailed) up at GameIndustry.biz for the past two weeks. It focuses on the furor when media outlets misinterpreted Nintendo as saying they were canceling their next generation console.
"This is hardly the proudest hour for online game media, and it illustrates the need for journalists - even some of those working for large professional sites - to more effectively divide fact from speculation and opinion in their reporting."
I am left with a major concern. Is this good science? What I mean by this is that we have to be careful about how we determine causality. Is this a good random sample? What are the determining factors that make this causal link?
A lot of good science doesn't prove a causal link. A lot of the times it just proves an association which the scientists may or may not believe is causal. The association is justification to come up with theories and do more research on the subject in order to figure out the cause of the observed phenomenon. A recent example is the study that use of anti-biotics is associated with breast cancer. Scientists are telling women not to stop taking anti-biotics prescribed by their doctors because they believe the cause was the diseases the anti-biotics were supposed to be fighting, but it's just a belief, they may change their minds later as new evidence comes in.
In this case they believe it _is_ causal. They have a proposed mechanism for the damage, and they predicted that certain drugs would reduce the damage before the conducted the tests, and those drugs did indeed reduce the damage.
"To test the idea, the researchers gave some of the rats drugs that either neutralize free radicals or decrease free iron before exposing the animals to the magnetic field. The treatments supported the hypothesis, effectively blocking the effects of the fields and protecting the rats' brain cell DNA from damage."
The scientists may be wrong, but that's always a possibility. They're saying what they believe their research shows, and they'll be proven right or wrong later.
And on a side note, since i use an electric shaver (as well as the many other magnetic field producing devices in all of our lives) does that mean i should start taking more anti-oxidants? Seems like whatever treatment they used on the rats would be a preferable alternative to living in a cave.
Black Mages is awesome, although there are a lot of songs that they missed that i'd like to hear a hard rock rendition of. Hopefully there will be a Black Mages 2 or some such.
Have you looked around OC Remix? It's got tons of remixes from all kinds of video games, including a ton from (most of) the FF games.
I assumed that the language was gaelic, for no good reason. Hmmm *googles* at first glance the consensus seems to be that it's Saami, "1. A member of a people of nomadic herding tradition inhabiting Lapland. 2. Any of the Finnic languages of the Sami." So it would seem that you're mostly right.
We've adapted to it, even "learned" how to get energy from it, but we did that with wrapper layers.
Oxygen-releasing algae were the ultimate environmental catastrophe.
So maybe if we don't clean up our act and end up polluting almost everything on earth into extinction a few creatures will learn to adapt and start a whole new kind of life going.
Something that figures out how to live off of all of the acid rain we're producing...
Hey! Maybe Europa is the end result of a civilization like ours! Perhaps that's where the monolith makers came from? The warning might just be because they don't want us fucking around with their stuff while they're away from home cruising the galaxy.
The presence of molecular oxygen, O2, is a result of the presence of life. The presence of atomic oxygen, in whatever form, is a prerequisite for life, at least of the kind found on Earth.
The oxygen was here long before life, it was just locked up in other chemical compounds besides O2.
I think the idea of advertising for big-ticket items like cars isn't to make you go out and buy one right _now_. Primarily they want to make sure that when you're going out to get a new car _anyways_ that you think of them then. They're not as much aimed at promting action as influencing decisions.
A certain small percentage of people are on the edge of buying a car at any given point, so the comercials are aimed primarily at them, but at all the rest of us in a long term campaign of indoctrination.
As for whether marketing even works at all, there have been some cases where very well done or very lucky marketing campaigns have had a significant impact. (For example, to reference a recent slashdot thread, the DeBeers attempt to convince americans to buy diamonds for engagement rings and other romantic jewelry.) However i believe that in most cases the evidence shows that marketing is effective, but only if it's not facing any counter marketning. Which makes it a Prisoners' Dilema type problem. If neither Coke nor Pepsi advertised they could both save a lot of money and probably not affect their market share much. However if one of them decided to stop advertising and the other didn't, the one without advertising would see a loss of sales, so both companies are "forced" to spend millions (billions?) on advertising.
This may extend to different kinds of marketing as well. If Chrysler has it's product features in a fun game they may see a rise in sales from people who were thinking about buying a car, played the game, and were slightly influenced. (It doesn't have to be a _big_ influence, there are a lot of people out there buying cars, and for some percentage of them a small amount of influence can tip the decision.) However if and when other manufacturers start using games as marketing that edge may very well disapear. At that point all of them will be commited to producing these advertising games without actually gaining any real advantage from them, but will be unable to stop as long as their competitors continue.
Another option is the sporting notion of a handicap. If somebody is really good, then the server makes it harder on them. If the server makes the handicap public, then they still get to be known as a bad-ass, while everybody still gets to have fun.
They have handicaps set up in Super Smash Brothers Melee, and it works great. There's a little bit of frustration if another player constantly has a higher handicap that you, but no where near as bad as if that same person is constantly kicking your ass.
Of course it's also fun for the whole group if you're playing with a bot to see how negative a handicap you can get it down to:)
Agreed, i'm exactly the same way. Odds are i'll kick the crap out of anyone else for the first few days if we both pick up the game at the same time. However as more time passes if we keep playing they'll catch up and eventually surpass me.
The _only_ game where I managed much improvement was Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge, and that was only through more than a year of constant playing, and i certainly wouldn't be suprised if there are other who have surpassed me now that i haven't practiced in about two years.
Slashdot Mirror
Only a certain subset of conservatives are gun nuts. Most of the conservatives i know in orange county are the spoiled rich types who think the world was made to serve them just because they were born into a rich family, and i don't think most of them have guns.
Well at least now we've figured out that damn middle step.
1. File an obvious patent.
2. Sue a small company with few lawyers for patent infringement.
3. Profit!!!
vs.
1. File an obvious patent.
2. Sue a ginormous company with tons of lawyers for patent infringement.
3. Get your patent invalidated by the patent office!!!
5% is WAY low. Even I got infected (an app on tucows was listed as freeware, but turned out to be ad/spyware), even if you don't coun't cookies and GUIDs..
Here's a quicker test. Ask the user if they've ever heard of SpyBot or AdAware. Now ignore their answer, they've got spyware.
Let's see, i ran AdAware this morning because i got a pretty nasty infection. Let's see what has accumulated in the 12 hours since them.
21 Objects.
1 Process, 7 registry keys, 4 registry values, 7 files, 2 folders. I seem to be getting "JRaun" a lot.
I'm not really suprised, and i use netscape about 95% of the time.
Hundreds of dollars? Exactly how many memory cards do you buy? They're only $15 or $20 each i think, certainly not hundreds.
Or is there some other accessory you think a built in hard drive replaces? An add-on hard drive certainly, but it's not that much cheaper to get in included that to buy it after the fact. Why do you think the Xbox is so much more expensive?
Some would even argue about their competency to judge films.
I seem to remember that a few years ago there was some artsy type film that involved some females talking to each other about their sex lives. No actualy sex, just talking about it, and the MPAA wanted to rate it NC-17.
Ok, after five minutes of Googling i think i have it narrowed down:
"And some suspect that the MPAA rates films about female sexuality tougher than those focusing on men. For example, an independent teen comedy called Coming Soon that was a hit at the Seattle International Film Festival has had trouble finding a domestic distributor (20th Century Fox bought international rights) after being rated NC-17. The film, which is about three teenage girls who talk frankly about sex and their interest in it, contains no nudity and no violence. The filmmaker has said that when she accused the board of having a gender-based double standard she was told that the board was merely reflecting the mores of the nation."
(Excerpt from this site)
So if we can't even trust the review boards to judge movies fairly, how can we expect them to judge video games?
I hope they're referencing the ship and not the battle the ship was named for. If it's the battle we'll miss out on most of our favorite characters :(
Not only have people pointed out all the variants of XFree86 that work, but if you put in "porn" you get the porn warning. So far so good. However if you put in "porn porn" you don't get the warning, and the first sight returned is "blowjob pictures!!!" followed by "pornstar pictures!!!" and etc.
If there are examples of complex characters before and afterwards, i'm not sure if Donaldson deserves credit for anything.
The problem was that i got the not liking him part just fine, but it was never even a question of whether to cheer him on or hate him, i just hated him. I wanted him to stop whining and being pathetic for awhile, and then i just kind of wanted him to die and get it over with.
In my mind whatever redeeming qualities he had were ovewhelmed by all his negative ones. There wasn't enough to like, and he was too pathetic to make hating him interesting.
As far as i can remember about the books ten years after the fact, his biggest problem was his pasivity. He didn't really do much, he just stumbled through the world. His most decisive action (with the possible exception of the ending, which i don't remember too well since i'd lost interest by that point) was the one which i hated him the most for.
I was also annoyed by the implication that guys have these urges, you know? And if they can't resist those urges and go and rape someone, well, it's not right, but it's understandable. Boys will be boys you know? And didn't she end up deciding she loved him later or something like that? *gag*
Well i'd be happy with anything that wasn't The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I managed to drag myself all the way through the first trilogy and definitely wasn't impressed, but i gave up half-way through the first book of the second trilogy when it became aparent that it was going to be as lackluster as the first trilogy. Covenant was too whiney and annoying to be a good hero, and too pathetic to be a good anti-hero. Of course the fact that the first thing he does is rape a girl because he can't restrain his "manly urges" didn't really endear him to me.
Mirror of Her Dreams on the other hand was very good, wouldn't mind seeing a movie of that one, although there are other books i would nominate first.
That would fall under the rubric of outsourcing programmers. I don't know how companies that buy game engines handle it, either they have a contract with the original company to get some changes made, in which case you've got the same communication issues, or they have access to the source code as part of the agreement and have their own coders to make whatever changes they want, in which case they've reduced the number of programmers they need (possibly,) but certainly not eliminated them.
Given that one of the companies i was thinking of applying to recently said they wanted programmers experienced with Lithtech (an engine sold by Monolith) to write game code, i'm guessing that it's the later approach.
if you're into overdone deisgn docs, you could probably outsource the non-core design team, though I'd question moving the writing of dialog for a completely different country etc ;)
Which parts are you saying should get outsourced? Like you said the game text shouldn't be outsourced, and clearly you don't want to outsource the basic game idea unless you're outsourcing everything. Outsourcing things affecting game play is a really bad idea. When i was working at an EA subsidiary that did RTSs, they had subcontracted to a company in England to do one of the games based on the franchise. When the game was getting close to ship date they were _still_ having serious trouble getting it balanced, so management decided to fly two or three of our best designers out there to fix it for them. They spent a week or two in England fixing all the problems. And note that these same people had been trying to help them from California through email for at least several weeks prior, but the difficulties in doing so were too severe for them to make much progress on the issue, hence the decision to fly them there where they could deal with things first hand and be more effective.
So it seems that game play issues are something that companies prefer to spend extra money on to get good results, which makes me doubt they'll be a target of outsourcing.
If there is some element of design that is so unimportant that it could be feasibly outsourced, i expect the company will consider just getting rid of it before they consider incuring the disadvantages of outsourcing.
I agree, that can be a very good thing, but only if you take what the outsider says with a grain of salt. The last game i worked on they decided in the last month or two that it was really lacking, so they brought in someone from another area of the company who hadn't dealt with the game before.
He had a LOT of suggestions. Some of the suggestions were really good, and some of them sucked. However since he had been brought in to make suggestions we were under orders from on high to try to implement all of his ideas.
Overall the game probably improved because of his input, but it would have been even better if we'd ignored half of what he said. He was especially worried about the dificulty of the game. He insisted that we add all kinds of changes to make the game easier and implement them at all difficulty levels. He was afraid that if we didn't some reviewer would start playing the game at the most difficult setting and think it was too hard and give it a bad review. The only thing he would let us change was the HP/damage ratios, so we bumped those up a lot for the most difficult level and hoped that would compensate. (Some of the reviews still complained about how easy the game was, so at best it was only a partial success)
In one level there were turrets that were supposed to track the player which he didn't think were good enough. He suggested we should make changes A, B, C, and D, all of which were fairly reasonable. I worked on it and told him that we had A, B and C, and something that was similar to D, but not exactly what he wanted. (He wanted circles of light to follow the targeting lasers around whever they struck an object, and all the consoles are limited in how many lights they can calculate at one time. The best i could come up with in the time available was to have sparks shooting out of wherever the lasers hit.) His response was that if we couldn't have all four, we should just yank the turrets out. We did so, despite how much improved the new turrets were over the old ones, and it made that level way too simple afterwards, but we didn't have the time to rework it.
It would have helped if we'd started the whole process of getting outside input earlier so that we weren't quite as rushed, but it wouldn't have fixed the whole problem. It can be difficult to try and fairly judge the suggestions of someone on something you've been working on for months and they've been playing for a few days or weeks, but it's better than accepting what they say on blind faith. _Everyone_ has some good ideas, some ideas that are good in theory but suck in practice, and some ideas that just suck. This ratio improves for professional developers (or so we like to think) but no one is ever compeltly free of dumb ideas.
Games are art, more specifically they are art of the same kind as books and movies in that they have a strong cultural bias. Paintings and music are also culturally baiased, but they're much more open to apprecation by members of other cultures. Video games, books and movies all tend to make assumptions about the backgrounds and experiences of the audience that are necessary to fully understand the work.
Sure, EA could set up a team in India to develop games for a lot cheaper than a team in the US or Japan, but the resulting games probably wouldn't sell very well. Even games transfered between the US and Japan tend not to sell very well statistically speaking (and i say this as an american who likes Japanese RPGs, but i know i'm part of a small group.) Companies in one country have tried to design games that they thought would appeal to the other, and as often as not they have bombed. I believe Final Fantasy Mystic Quest was one such experiment.
So in order for the game to have decent odds of selling well in the targeted area, the designers need to be from the targeted area or an area that has close cultural ties, such as US and the UK.
Ok, so keep the designers in america, and ship everyone else off to India. There are probably people capable of doing the work in India, but you'll run into another problem. Designers frequently don't know what the hell they're doing. I appologize to any designers out there reading this, but all the ones i've worked with know it's true. The programmers will write some tool for the designers to use, and the designers will get lost and come to us for help. We'll tell them how to do that, and they'll be fine for a few days until they run into another problem. Sometimes the problem will be something they can deal with if they just learn the scripting lanague or whatever the issue is, sometimes it will be something new that we need to implement, and sometimes it will be something we told them to do or not to do weeks earlier. They'll do A and complain that the enemy does blah, and we'll tell them that they can't do A, they have to do B or C instead. Then they'll come back a week later saying if they do A, the enemy does blah. You'll explain again, and they'll say "Oh yeah, you told me that before didn't you?" Designers just seem to think differently than programmers, which is why designers are designers and programmer are programmers i suppose.
So if you attempt to outsource the programmers, you're going to run into huge communication difficulties between them and the designers, both in terms of developing what the designers want and explaining to them what they're doing wrong. You'll have possible langauge barriers, time delays from emailing back and forth across multiple time zones, the difficulty of not being able to actually _show_ the other person what you're talking about, etc. The reason why companies frequently have onsite QA even when there's an offsite QA team is because often you can't figure out what the offsite QA team is talking about just based on the write-up they email you. You either need to fiddle around for it for a long time yourself, or have local QA spend the time reproducing it and then show you.
There are similar issues between artists and programmers, and i imagine there are also issues like that between designers and artists. If you seperate any section from the others you're going to introduce masive delays and complications to the project.
The only area that i've seen effectively outsourced is sound. However it's interesting to note that the only company i worked for which had it's own in house sound department was frequently cited for the quality of the sound effects in the reviews of the games. And this is just with outsourcing the sound to another american person or group, even within the same state.
So yes, they could save money if they outsourced the labor to India, but if they only out-sou
I'm 28, and am quite happy with my GameCube and PS2. I don't really care much for FPS, and really don't see your logic in apparently claiming that all people over 10 are primarily interested in FPS. The fact that THE must have title for the Xbox is a FPS is perhaps my #2 or #3 reason for being completly underwhelmed by Microsoft's console.
I've played some FPSs at work on PC (Counterstrike, some version of Doom, Battlefield 1942) and i've tried out a few FPSs on consoles, and i can't figure why anyone would ever choose consoles as their FPS vehicle of choice, regardless of how much or how little they were interested in the genre.
As for "most of the games listed as great games for the PS2 and GameCube are available for Dreamcast," care to back that up? Out of the thirty odd games i listed for GameCube earlier in this dicusion, i seriously doubt more than 10% or 20% are available on Dreamcast, which hardly qualifies as "most." In fact the only ones i can think of right now are Skies of Arcadia and Ikuraga, but go ahead, prove me wrong.
I don't have any idea if i listed "every single game Nintendo has ever made," (though i seriously doubt it) and i don't really care. I listed all the GameCube games i could think of that i consider to be of superior quality. A lot of those are first or second party games, but that doesn't make them any less fun.
If _you_ are so concerned about whether Nintendo has produced any duds, why don't _you_ go out and do some research on it? I wouldn't be suprised if Nintendo has produced one or more games that were less than stellar, however if we try to turn this into a comparison of crappy games on each platform we're going to be buried by the reams of listings.
Why is it that whenever anti-Nintendo zealots open their mouths they tend to hyperbolize? "There aren't even ten great GameCube games," "you always include every single game Nintendo has ever made."
Metroid Prime
Eternal Darkness
Super Smash Brothers Melee
Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker
Viewtiful Joe
Super Monkey Ball
Pikmin
Animal Crossing
Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles
Mario Kart Double Dash
Mario Party
Super Mario Sunshine
Mario Golf
F-Zero GX
Rogue Squadron
Ikaruga
Pac-Man vs.
Star Fox Adventures
Wario Ware
Oooops, went over ten, sorry. There are also some games available for multiple systems, or that aren't quite out yet.
Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes
Tales of Symphonia
Prince of Persia
Beyond Good and Evil
Resident Evil
Lord of the Rings
Spider-Man
Harvest Moon
Skies of Arcadia
Soul Caliber II
SSX 3
The Simpsons Hit & Run
I'm not even including several cases of multiple games from the same series. (I don't count Mario Kart, Mario Party, etc as being the same series.)
There's probably a lot more than i'm forgetting about, especially in the action and sports genres which i don't play very much.
"This is hardly the proudest hour for online game media, and it illustrates the need for journalists - even some of those working for large professional sites - to more effectively divide fact from speculation and opinion in their reporting."
A lot of good science doesn't prove a causal link. A lot of the times it just proves an association which the scientists may or may not believe is causal. The association is justification to come up with theories and do more research on the subject in order to figure out the cause of the observed phenomenon. A recent example is the study that use of anti-biotics is associated with breast cancer. Scientists are telling women not to stop taking anti-biotics prescribed by their doctors because they believe the cause was the diseases the anti-biotics were supposed to be fighting, but it's just a belief, they may change their minds later as new evidence comes in.
In this case they believe it _is_ causal. They have a proposed mechanism for the damage, and they predicted that certain drugs would reduce the damage before the conducted the tests, and those drugs did indeed reduce the damage.
"To test the idea, the researchers gave some of the rats drugs that either neutralize free radicals or decrease free iron before exposing the animals to the magnetic field. The treatments supported the hypothesis, effectively blocking the effects of the fields and protecting the rats' brain cell DNA from damage."
The scientists may be wrong, but that's always a possibility. They're saying what they believe their research shows, and they'll be proven right or wrong later.
And on a side note, since i use an electric shaver (as well as the many other magnetic field producing devices in all of our lives) does that mean i should start taking more anti-oxidants? Seems like whatever treatment they used on the rats would be a preferable alternative to living in a cave.
Have you looked around OC Remix? It's got tons of remixes from all kinds of video games, including a ton from (most of) the FF games.
I assumed that the language was gaelic, for no good reason. Hmmm *googles* at first glance the consensus seems to be that it's Saami, "1. A member of a people of nomadic herding tradition inhabiting Lapland. 2. Any of the Finnic languages of the Sami." So it would seem that you're mostly right.
Oxygen-releasing algae were the ultimate environmental catastrophe.
So maybe if we don't clean up our act and end up polluting almost everything on earth into extinction a few creatures will learn to adapt and start a whole new kind of life going.
Something that figures out how to live off of all of the acid rain we're producing...
Hey! Maybe Europa is the end result of a civilization like ours! Perhaps that's where the monolith makers came from? The warning might just be because they don't want us fucking around with their stuff while they're away from home cruising the galaxy.
The oxygen was here long before life, it was just locked up in other chemical compounds besides O2.
A certain small percentage of people are on the edge of buying a car at any given point, so the comercials are aimed primarily at them, but at all the rest of us in a long term campaign of indoctrination.
As for whether marketing even works at all, there have been some cases where very well done or very lucky marketing campaigns have had a significant impact. (For example, to reference a recent slashdot thread, the DeBeers attempt to convince americans to buy diamonds for engagement rings and other romantic jewelry.) However i believe that in most cases the evidence shows that marketing is effective, but only if it's not facing any counter marketning. Which makes it a Prisoners' Dilema type problem. If neither Coke nor Pepsi advertised they could both save a lot of money and probably not affect their market share much. However if one of them decided to stop advertising and the other didn't, the one without advertising would see a loss of sales, so both companies are "forced" to spend millions (billions?) on advertising.
This may extend to different kinds of marketing as well. If Chrysler has it's product features in a fun game they may see a rise in sales from people who were thinking about buying a car, played the game, and were slightly influenced. (It doesn't have to be a _big_ influence, there are a lot of people out there buying cars, and for some percentage of them a small amount of influence can tip the decision.) However if and when other manufacturers start using games as marketing that edge may very well disapear. At that point all of them will be commited to producing these advertising games without actually gaining any real advantage from them, but will be unable to stop as long as their competitors continue.
It's amusing to note the couples based solely upon the imaginations of the players (and fanfic writers.)
They have handicaps set up in Super Smash Brothers Melee, and it works great. There's a little bit of frustration if another player constantly has a higher handicap that you, but no where near as bad as if that same person is constantly kicking your ass.
Of course it's also fun for the whole group if you're playing with a bot to see how negative a handicap you can get it down to :)
The _only_ game where I managed much improvement was Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge, and that was only through more than a year of constant playing, and i certainly wouldn't be suprised if there are other who have surpassed me now that i haven't practiced in about two years.