The experiement wasn't a very rigerous scientific experiment. It's possible that the games offered on the "no download available" page are more apealing than the games that have demos. For a real experiment you'd need some way of having a control group. Like half the people who go to the webpage can download a demo for a certain game, and the other half are told no demo was available. Of course i believe Amazon or some other big retailer just recently got into trouble for trying to do some similar experimentation with prices.
Of course the other thing to consider is if these results are accurate, what accounts for the difference? Is it people not wanting to pay for what they can get (in part) for free, like the RIAA and such is always so happy to accuse people of? Or is it that people try the demos and find out the games aren't as good as they hoped? If it's the second case, there might be quite a number of unhappy campers who don't like what they paid for once they tried it out. In that case, once has to decide if the increased sales from no demo games are worth possibly alienating your customer base.
Clearly a name change is needed. Just like MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging) used to be called NRIs (nuclear...). Maybe something like "elemental decay engines" would be less scary for the illiterate masses?
Which nicely abreviates to EDE. How could you be scared by a nice friendly device named Eddie?:)
Do you own a computer? Do you feel cheated about that to? Do you feel cheated that your car is worth less now than when you bought it? Do you feel cheated that the food you buy at the store is worth less after you eat it and then excrete it?
Very few physical things manage to retain their worth over time. Certainly nothing technological does with the few and far between exceptions that become collector items.
This gradual price drop has been a constant for every single video game system released so far, and for some reason you expected the GameCube to be immune to this trend?
The only way in which i would consider you to have "lost out" in any sense was if you left your GameCube in it's original packaging and never played it at all. In that case however i would consider you to be an idiot, not to have been cheated. Next time, if you don't consider the value of being able to play the newest games as soon as they come out to be greater than the $200 or $300 price of the newest console, don't buy it.
Oppositively, you could play Mario Kart on the SAME TV, thereby actually staying with your girlfriend in the same room, and in close proximity, even though you are both looking fixatedly at a TV
Who said the TVs would be in different rooms? I've got two TVs in my living room (medium size screen and old 13" tv/vcr) and there's nothing to say he doesn't have a similar setup.
... because, honestly, there aren't that many goood cartoons out there, maybe a handful, and Illiad is still in the top 10 tech comics, IMHO.
I used to think User Friendly was pretty good, but then either it's quality deteriorated, or i found other, better comics to put it in perspective.
Here's a list of (some of) the comics that in my opinion are better than User Friendly. As usual, your opinion may differ and your mileage may vary.
Adventurers! the best of the CRPG comics.
Dragon Tails comic about strange geeky dragons and a squirrel or two. (Has jokes that cover all kinds of geekery, not just the tech variety)
The Wings of ChangeFantasy comic about a dragon, a girl with wings, and a group of pixie children
The Devil's Panties "Real Life" type comic about a female protagonist and a couple of her friends. Frequently touches on goth and comic geekdom, and there's a side comic about LARPs.
Sparkling Generation Valkyrie YuukiA manga style take-off on the "pretty-girl" anime genre. Has some Ranma-esque gender-bending themes if that disturbs you.
Freefall Science fiction comic, primarily focused on an kleptomaniac alien scavenger, a friendly but somewhat dim robot, and a genetically engineered anthropomorphic female wolf.
Ozy and Millie One of those comics with a world (mostly) like ours but filled with anthropomorphic animals. Frequently philisophical or political.
Something Positive "Real life" type comic with a very twisted and sometimes sick sense of humor.
Venus Envy A comic about highschool aged MtF transgendered person dealing with all the issues you'd expect such a person to be dealing with. Obviously lots of gender-bending issues.
8-bit Theater tied for second best CRPG comic.
RPG World the other tied for second best CRPG comic.
Anti-here for Hire by the author of Adventurers! Same style mostly, but with a comic-book superhero theme.
Megatokyo some people love the comic, some people can't stand it. The art is certainly pretty though in either case.
Penny Arcade people talk about it enough on Slashdot (including several mentions in this thread) that i'm not going to even bother describing it.
And last (just because everyone here has probably heard of it already) Sluggy, which has had its unfunny moments, but unlike User Friendly has managed to pull out of those slumps and return to its former heights every time (so far)
There's also a large set of comics that i only check every couple of weeks because they don't updated more than once a week, but are still worth taking the time to check. However i'm going to just stick to my daily list at the moment.
"Surprisingly, the main criticisms for this model come from old earth creationists, and not others."
That's only because it's so bad.
Funny how if no one disagrees, it must be right because no one disagreed, but if people disagree, it's "well there must be something to the argument or you wouldn't get so worked up about trying to disprove it." Note Rush Limbaugh's response to people lambasting him about his racist statements on ESPN.
Then there's dinosaur remains from hundreds of millions of years ago...
Did God put all that there as a test of our "faith?"
My view of the matter, as an athiest with an ironic bent, is that if god went to that much trouble to convince us the earth was millions or billions of years old, i for one think we ought to play along with the idea rather than trying to spoil whatever effect god was intending to produce with all that work:)
The Universe, however, can not be closed, because it is defined as that which encompasses all. So, by definition, saying that the universe is "closed" and simultaneously "all encompassing" is a blatant contradiction, because calling it closed means that it has a boundary of some sort which must be crossed to get to some other part of it.
Who defined it as "that which encompasses all"? You're trying to argue what the universe is like based off of the gramer of the English language. I can assure you that the universe neither knows nor cares what English grammer has to say about its current condition.
Think of a video game, like asteroids. You can fly off one "edge" and you come back on the opposite edge. The space that universe contains is clearly finite, yet you can't ever get to the "boundary" that seperates it from the rest of the world.
Just because everything inside the universe that is finite has an "outside" where the other stuff is doesn't mean that the universe itself has to follow those rules. It's possible that this universe is all that exists, but that it has a "closed" nature and a finite space, even if you couldn't ever get to the "edge."
I agree with about 90% of what you said. However we do have a population problem, it's just not the problem everyone things.
Yes, if the entire world were brought up to the US standard of living most of the problems that people normally worry about would go away. However given our current technology we don't have that natural resources, particularly energy resources, to support the entire world at the US level.
That's not to say that we're doomed, either as a species or to a future of haves and have-nots, but we need to figure out what an acceptable level of development for the whole world is, and figure out a sustainable energy scheme that can support that level.
Every gamer who grows up in Washington knows that Nintendo of America is headquartered in Redmond. Same city as Microsoft ironically enough. Check your own facts before accusing someone else of getting theirs wrong.
Okay hotshot, let's see you produce something as interesting as that metalwork, and then _maybe_ we'll consider listening to you talk trash about a celebrated artist.
Yup, you're right, there were two posts at that level of the conversation, and i somehow hit reply to the wrong one. I obviously need to get some sleep or something =P Sorry for the mixup.
How aren't these people deserving? You may disagree about the criteria under which they were judged, but they were picked because the judges thought they deserved the fellowship. It's not like a lottery where they just picked random people to give the money to.
Some are, some are not. If they will still work for less money, they are clearly overpaid (especially when this wasted money could be spent on education)
Only in a libertarian "what the market will bear" aspect, not in a "value of what is produced" aspect. Teachers will work for less if they have no other choices or if they honestly care about the children, that doesn't mean that they're getting overpaid, it might mean that they're getting taken advantage of.
You know, the anti-fanboys like you are just as irrational and tunnel-sighted as the fanboys.
There are two reasons i submited this article. First, if a Nintendo anti-fanboy noticed the report and submited it first, they would have done their best to play up the negative side as much as possible, such as you do with every report about Nintendo, good or bad. (Note how eager you are to post in response to this article, but remained strangely quiet about the quadrupled sales of the GameCube.)
I thought it was better to have the article submited by a (more) neutral party who would actually present the whole story. Nintendo is facing a likely loss for the first half. That loss is partly due to poor sales, and partly due to the currency market. Nintendo is projecting lowered profit expectations for the full year, but is still expecting a pretty significant profit. And finally they're implementing a new price point in many countries, the similar cut in the US having already caused a huge surge in console sales here.
Second of all, unlike you fanboys and anti-fanboys, i'm interested in finding out the facts without concern for whether or not they fit a pre-conceived notion of what i want the facts to be. This is interesting news, whether or not i like what it means (and what it means is open for debate of course.) How many times have you posted anything about Nintendo doing well? Or have you only sought out information that supports your own view that Nintendo is doomed?
That's strange, people have at work been talking about the half life 2 code, and both the term "leaked" and "stolen" have been used regarding it pretty interchangeably. Everyone seems to understand what everyone else is talking about just fine.
And yet, in the movies, a similarly disproportionately high number of the characters were Jedi -- so what's the problem?
Not really, what struck me about the movies was how few jedi there were, not how many. As pointed out by the grandparent poster, there are thousands of planets with millions or billions of people on each of them, yet the galactic headquarters of the jedi has a hundred or less jedi in it.
However it is not suprising that a lot of the main characters are jedi given their nature. Normally a jedi is trained by one or more other jedi, and if one person has jedi powers the odds of a family member of theirs having jedi powers are a _lot_ higher. Therefore if you know one jedi (or are following around one jedi in the plot) you are quite likely to run into a lot more in a "six degrees of seperation" kind of way.
But as other people have said, this is all made up anyways. It doesn't matter if the game follows the movie exactly, unless they claim that their numbers are "realistic" in which case people are free to nitpick.
Just to add to the iteration of geekiness, the reason that logic is faulty (at least one of the reasons) is that if you take an infintie number of planets, and some of them are inhabited, say, 1 out of ten, then you are multiplying an infinite number by a fraction, which also results in infinity. I would say that it's a smaller infinity, although mathematicians would probably disagree with me. (I seem to remember that one infinity being ten times as large as another infinity doesn't make it "larger," or something similar, although there are larger and smaller infinities)
I agree with you, it seems like a strange and stupid campaign just based off of the description and that one screen shot. Maybe i'll change my mind when i see one of the commercials. (If we ever make it out of crunch time here at work so i have time to watch tv again at least)
No, he was using hyperbole to good effect as a commentary about the people who try to twist any news about Nintendo, no matter the nature of the news, into something negative.
assuming i AM overestimating the stores profit, even if the store was making no profit at all, how could they produce it for 100 bucks?
How can i go down to the store and get a calculator for a few buck that has more computing power than ENIAC, which cost about half a million to make? Why is it that if i sell a computer i bought for $2000 a few years ago that i'll be lucky to get a few hundred for it now?
As always, prices for electronics have dropped, and that drop is even larger when you're talking about something that is being mass produced in a single configuration.
How exactly does what the article talks about relate to your quote? The article was about the originality and inovation (or lack thereof) of developers, not the success or failure of consoles.
As a lot of people here have already said, pointing to the Tony Hawk and Grand Theft Auto franchises as bastions of originality is really stretching. Besides that though, if he had been talking about consoles instead of developers his conclusion would have been that XBox would rise to dominance in America while GameCube and PS2 duked it out in Japan, which is not what your quote claimed.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't remember playing Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles on my NES.
Of course the other thing to consider is if these results are accurate, what accounts for the difference? Is it people not wanting to pay for what they can get (in part) for free, like the RIAA and such is always so happy to accuse people of? Or is it that people try the demos and find out the games aren't as good as they hoped? If it's the second case, there might be quite a number of unhappy campers who don't like what they paid for once they tried it out. In that case, once has to decide if the increased sales from no demo games are worth possibly alienating your customer base.
Which nicely abreviates to EDE. How could you be scared by a nice friendly device named Eddie? :)
*laughs* I'm usually not much of a grammer-nazi, but that was such a blatant violation that i cringed when i first read it. They have went?!?
Very few physical things manage to retain their worth over time. Certainly nothing technological does with the few and far between exceptions that become collector items.
This gradual price drop has been a constant for every single video game system released so far, and for some reason you expected the GameCube to be immune to this trend?
The only way in which i would consider you to have "lost out" in any sense was if you left your GameCube in it's original packaging and never played it at all. In that case however i would consider you to be an idiot, not to have been cheated. Next time, if you don't consider the value of being able to play the newest games as soon as they come out to be greater than the $200 or $300 price of the newest console, don't buy it.
Who said the TVs would be in different rooms? I've got two TVs in my living room (medium size screen and old 13" tv/vcr) and there's nothing to say he doesn't have a similar setup.
I used to think User Friendly was pretty good, but then either it's quality deteriorated, or i found other, better comics to put it in perspective.
Here's a list of (some of) the comics that in my opinion are better than User Friendly. As usual, your opinion may differ and your mileage may vary.
Adventurers! the best of the CRPG comics.
Dragon Tails comic about strange geeky dragons and a squirrel or two. (Has jokes that cover all kinds of geekery, not just the tech variety) The Wings of ChangeFantasy comic about a dragon, a girl with wings, and a group of pixie children
The Devil's Panties "Real Life" type comic about a female protagonist and a couple of her friends. Frequently touches on goth and comic geekdom, and there's a side comic about LARPs.
Sparkling Generation Valkyrie YuukiA manga style take-off on the "pretty-girl" anime genre. Has some Ranma-esque gender-bending themes if that disturbs you.
Freefall Science fiction comic, primarily focused on an kleptomaniac alien scavenger, a friendly but somewhat dim robot, and a genetically engineered anthropomorphic female wolf.
Ozy and Millie One of those comics with a world (mostly) like ours but filled with anthropomorphic animals. Frequently philisophical or political.
Something Positive "Real life" type comic with a very twisted and sometimes sick sense of humor.
Venus Envy A comic about highschool aged MtF transgendered person dealing with all the issues you'd expect such a person to be dealing with. Obviously lots of gender-bending issues.
8-bit Theater tied for second best CRPG comic.
RPG World the other tied for second best CRPG comic.
Anti-here for Hire by the author of Adventurers! Same style mostly, but with a comic-book superhero theme.
Megatokyo some people love the comic, some people can't stand it. The art is certainly pretty though in either case.
Penny Arcade people talk about it enough on Slashdot (including several mentions in this thread) that i'm not going to even bother describing it.
Okay, I'm tired of making descriptions, so some other good comics that didn't make it into the top tier (but still better than User Friendly IMHO) if you feel like looking around, PvP, Ctrl-Alt-Del, Saturnalia. The Life of Riley, No Need for Bushido
And last (just because everyone here has probably heard of it already) Sluggy, which has had its unfunny moments, but unlike User Friendly has managed to pull out of those slumps and return to its former heights every time (so far)
There's also a large set of comics that i only check every couple of weeks because they don't updated more than once a week, but are still worth taking the time to check. However i'm going to just stick to my daily list at the moment.
That's only because it's so bad.
Funny how if no one disagrees, it must be right because no one disagreed, but if people disagree, it's "well there must be something to the argument or you wouldn't get so worked up about trying to disprove it." Note Rush Limbaugh's response to people lambasting him about his racist statements on ESPN.
Did God put all that there as a test of our "faith?"
My view of the matter, as an athiest with an ironic bent, is that if god went to that much trouble to convince us the earth was millions or billions of years old, i for one think we ought to play along with the idea rather than trying to spoil whatever effect god was intending to produce with all that work :)
Who defined it as "that which encompasses all"? You're trying to argue what the universe is like based off of the gramer of the English language. I can assure you that the universe neither knows nor cares what English grammer has to say about its current condition.
Think of a video game, like asteroids. You can fly off one "edge" and you come back on the opposite edge. The space that universe contains is clearly finite, yet you can't ever get to the "boundary" that seperates it from the rest of the world.
Just because everything inside the universe that is finite has an "outside" where the other stuff is doesn't mean that the universe itself has to follow those rules. It's possible that this universe is all that exists, but that it has a "closed" nature and a finite space, even if you couldn't ever get to the "edge."
Yes, if the entire world were brought up to the US standard of living most of the problems that people normally worry about would go away. However given our current technology we don't have that natural resources, particularly energy resources, to support the entire world at the US level.
That's not to say that we're doomed, either as a species or to a future of haves and have-nots, but we need to figure out what an acceptable level of development for the whole world is, and figure out a sustainable energy scheme that can support that level.
Every gamer who grows up in Washington knows that Nintendo of America is headquartered in Redmond. Same city as Microsoft ironically enough. Check your own facts before accusing someone else of getting theirs wrong.
Okay hotshot, let's see you produce something as interesting as that metalwork, and then _maybe_ we'll consider listening to you talk trash about a celebrated artist.
Yup, you're right, there were two posts at that level of the conversation, and i somehow hit reply to the wrong one. I obviously need to get some sleep or something =P Sorry for the mixup.
How aren't these people deserving? You may disagree about the criteria under which they were judged, but they were picked because the judges thought they deserved the fellowship. It's not like a lottery where they just picked random people to give the money to.
Only in a libertarian "what the market will bear" aspect, not in a "value of what is produced" aspect. Teachers will work for less if they have no other choices or if they honestly care about the children, that doesn't mean that they're getting overpaid, it might mean that they're getting taken advantage of.
There are two reasons i submited this article. First, if a Nintendo anti-fanboy noticed the report and submited it first, they would have done their best to play up the negative side as much as possible, such as you do with every report about Nintendo, good or bad. (Note how eager you are to post in response to this article, but remained strangely quiet about the quadrupled sales of the GameCube.)
I thought it was better to have the article submited by a (more) neutral party who would actually present the whole story. Nintendo is facing a likely loss for the first half. That loss is partly due to poor sales, and partly due to the currency market. Nintendo is projecting lowered profit expectations for the full year, but is still expecting a pretty significant profit. And finally they're implementing a new price point in many countries, the similar cut in the US having already caused a huge surge in console sales here.
Second of all, unlike you fanboys and anti-fanboys, i'm interested in finding out the facts without concern for whether or not they fit a pre-conceived notion of what i want the facts to be. This is interesting news, whether or not i like what it means (and what it means is open for debate of course.) How many times have you posted anything about Nintendo doing well? Or have you only sought out information that supports your own view that Nintendo is doomed?
How exactly is his comment offtopic? The article is about the PSX, he's talking about the PSX vs. PS2, seems pretty ontopic to me.
That's strange, people have at work been talking about the half life 2 code, and both the term "leaked" and "stolen" have been used regarding it pretty interchangeably. Everyone seems to understand what everyone else is talking about just fine.
Not really, what struck me about the movies was how few jedi there were, not how many. As pointed out by the grandparent poster, there are thousands of planets with millions or billions of people on each of them, yet the galactic headquarters of the jedi has a hundred or less jedi in it.
However it is not suprising that a lot of the main characters are jedi given their nature. Normally a jedi is trained by one or more other jedi, and if one person has jedi powers the odds of a family member of theirs having jedi powers are a _lot_ higher. Therefore if you know one jedi (or are following around one jedi in the plot) you are quite likely to run into a lot more in a "six degrees of seperation" kind of way.
But as other people have said, this is all made up anyways. It doesn't matter if the game follows the movie exactly, unless they claim that their numbers are "realistic" in which case people are free to nitpick.
Just to add to the iteration of geekiness, the reason that logic is faulty (at least one of the reasons) is that if you take an infintie number of planets, and some of them are inhabited, say, 1 out of ten, then you are multiplying an infinite number by a fraction, which also results in infinity. I would say that it's a smaller infinity, although mathematicians would probably disagree with me. (I seem to remember that one infinity being ten times as large as another infinity doesn't make it "larger," or something similar, although there are larger and smaller infinities)
I agree with you, it seems like a strange and stupid campaign just based off of the description and that one screen shot. Maybe i'll change my mind when i see one of the commercials. (If we ever make it out of crunch time here at work so i have time to watch tv again at least)
No, he was using hyperbole to good effect as a commentary about the people who try to twist any news about Nintendo, no matter the nature of the news, into something negative.
How can i go down to the store and get a calculator for a few buck that has more computing power than ENIAC, which cost about half a million to make? Why is it that if i sell a computer i bought for $2000 a few years ago that i'll be lucky to get a few hundred for it now?
As always, prices for electronics have dropped, and that drop is even larger when you're talking about something that is being mass produced in a single configuration.
As a lot of people here have already said, pointing to the Tony Hawk and Grand Theft Auto franchises as bastions of originality is really stretching. Besides that though, if he had been talking about consoles instead of developers his conclusion would have been that XBox would rise to dominance in America while GameCube and PS2 duked it out in Japan, which is not what your quote claimed.