I don't know if history will ever note or realize it, but people have been forming their own paper and pen RPGs privately and secretly for years now. A friend of mine has a DM who modified the rules of D&D to have new skills, spells and races complete with stats, rules and background information. Now if someone is willing to spend the time to do that, theres bound to be someone who wrote up an entire paper and pen game if paper and pen RPGs have been around that long.
Thats because the netcode for Halo 1 on the XBox is designed solely for network play on a LAN. Try playing Halo on a 3rd party net system like Gamespy arcade and the slowdown will make you feel like you're on a 36.6k modem. In you read dev diaries about Halo PC, they talk about having to rewrite the net code since it was designed for LANs originally.
This may just be a crazy theory, but maybe the RIAA "told" eBay to close the auction. After all, if the auction had gone through and people were allowed to resell songs (as long as they gave up their own -only- copy) then the RIAA would have a new set of legal arguments on hand.
Your idea could use a few refinements, though. One most importantly is the creation of a database with all the players. Here on Slashdot, all you need is an e-mail address and you don't even need one from your ISP (I'm actually using a free one from Yahoo).
One of the best possible methods would be to have all the players be logged by their CD key. Without actually buying a copy, its very hard to get one without; stealing one or hacking in the company's computers and extract a CD which about 90% of all jackasses can't do. This way players can be secretly logged and tracked by their CD key: different aliases and accounts won't matter unless the person decides to buy multiple copies for multiple computers.
If a player's CD key "karma" gets wayyy too low, (say -500 with +500 being the starting point) then he could be subject to monitoring from the system to see if his actions "go too far". (Say he camps the newbie area PKing, with a bot no less, for 6 hours.) In which case the player could have his equipment lost, player stats erased or, admittedly an extreme, have the player's CD key completely and permenantly banned.
In a way, Blizzard's Warcraft 3 does the same method. If you cheat on Battle.net, map hack, then your CD key could get banned and the only way to fix that would be to buy another copy of the game. (CD key generators won't work online, in case any of you wondered about that)
I have no evidence to show (feel free to contribute) but I believe the deal between the two ended after GTA:VC, which makes logically sense since they've been porting their games like crazy after the GTA:VC release.
So far they've ported GTA3, GTA:VC, Midnight Club 2 and State of Emergency to the PC, GTA3 and GTA:VC, Midnight Club 2 to the XBox and Smuggler's Run:Warzones to the Gamecube. I don't know about you guys, but that sounds like a lot of games to be ported considering their coming from a developer who uses to make one system exclusive games.
It would be an interesting situtation if an artist could even speak to two different labels at the same time. The RIAA is like the Mafia, you can talk to Don on the east side or the Don of the west side. Either way, you end up working for the Godfather of the two. The RIAA is set up to keep the record labels organized and prevent price wars. If it wasn't for the RIAA, we would already be seeing $5~10 CDs in stores in order to compete with Apple's iTunes store.
(About 10 songs per CD; so $10 for a hard CD copy or $10 for a binary copy. It comes down to preferance and a hard CD copy has historically won over binary copies, for now at least.)
Well considering they censored the art statue in the game Maniac Mansion, as noted in a previous article, yes. I do have to say breasts do cause a lot of outcry in the U.S.
As for guns on video game covers, I dare you to take a screenshot of a cut up, shot person from Soldier of Fortune 2, with gore on, print it out and show it in a public area. Its just a screenshot of the game, but I doubt you'll be able to show it to a police officer without him tailing you until you leave area.
"why not re-release DOA:Extreme Volleyball in Japan, since it's the most popular Xbox title over there, in a silver box with a hologram of one of the girls breasts bouncing up and down? "
Step one : Put girls with bouncy breasts in game
Step two : Put girls with bouncy breasts on cover
Step three : ?
Step four : Profit!
The only thing thats probably keeping Microsoft from doing this is the censorship in America. Seriously, DOA:Extreme Volleyball caught enough protest just by being released with bouncy breasts in the game, can you imagine the outcry if Little Billy saw a game with a holographic image of a girl's breasts bouncing?
While deaths in multi-player FPS games are matter to be taken heavily, I think deaths in MMO games is an even greater matter. In MMO games, you're basicly paying for time so you'll want the most gameplay with what little time you have (unless you have no job, family or school to attend to).
Some MMO games fail to fix this problem, World War II Online suffered from extremely long distances to battles and few ways to get there quickly. Others suffer from imbalances of the use of easy respawning (my friend used to camp the exit of the beginner area and if he was killed, he just spawned out of the same exit he was camping; easy kills, nominal walking time.)
I think the underlying issue is the fact that death in gaming is too light in its punishment. Obviously, its just a game so we shouldn't take it TOO seriously and we shouldn't be penalized too harshly, but face it; when players can resort to charging the enemy with their strongest attacks only to get killed and respawn as a means of softening the enemy's HP, you know there are some spawning issues in the game. (A popular means of defeating a quest monster in MMORPGs.)
The burst.com side? Seems to me more like a cheap attempt to snag some cash from Microsoft while everyone is attacking it.
Burst's lawyers discovered a 35-week gap of missing mail during a critical portion of the negotiations.
I'm sorry, but the lawyers just managed to "discover" a 35-week period gap? According to the article, all the e-mails printed out filled 140 boxes. Now unless they decided to hire a couple hundred interns to sort through all that, or they used very small boxes, I seriously doubt Burst.com didn't plan this.
Its not a very fair statement though. Golf and baseball was more recognized as a simple, relatively cheap (the average GAMING PC costs about $1500 USD) and easy games to get into.
Nowadays you spend something like $50 to start playing in baseball (a glove, a ball and maybe a bat) and golf costs around $100 per person (rent the equipment). Gaming equipment on the other hand costs around $1500 and up. On top of that there is learning the game physics (for FPS games at least), the map designs (a MUST for RTS games), the balances of the units and weapons (a must for FPS games) and the clever tricks that can be used in a game (shooting through/around walls in FPSes and using underused tactics for surprise in RTSes.)
Which one sounds the most difficult to pick up on? Golf, baseball or so-called "professional gaming?"
Indeed, a lot of Linux users are either; hardcore users and know it better than their own neighborhood or are programmers and just reprogram it so only they can understand it.
Plop down a PC running Linux in front of 100 people for 1 hour and you'll come back finding them beating on the computer. There's a reason as to why Linux isn't mainstream (at least, not yet).
More like cheap, inexpensive mirrors. Their own site doesn't have the demo up. I guess they wanna save money and bandwidth by having other sites post it up. Goes to show how much trust management has in the game if they don't think they can spare the cash to pay bandwidth expenses.
Cars can be modified to have video game systems in them. Mini-TVs in vans and SUVs are becoming popular as well. That statement may become true in the future if wireless connections become stable enough.
Lik Sang can't sell PS1/2 mod chips anymore, correct? But can they still design and sell the manufacturing plans to other companies? Can they sell "PS1/2 Mod Chips for Dummies" books?
As much as I respect corporations doing this for more money, in the long run it defeats the purpose of a demo and hurts consumer loyality, as many people already pointed out. But another problem is partially the consumer's fault. A lot of people whine and bitch about Fileplanet's slow speeds but none of them care to note the fact that its one of the most used file sharing sites that has remained fully professional and not "outsourced" itself with mirror sites that isn't under their control. A LOT of "free" download sites really mirror to a bunch of other sites which they have no control of.
Unpopular may be an overpowerful word, but to win only one award? Here in the U.S. some people consider Half-Life 2 to be the second coming of the gaming Jesus with hype causing flame wars on message boards for console games.
Indeed. The PS2 has sold something like 30 billion systems (correct me if I'm wrong) while the XBox hasn't even sold half of that. If the PS2 only has 780,000 gamers online at this point, they are doing horribly in terms of online capabilities.
Everquest has something like 500,000 registered users, and thats for a 4+ year old MMORPG game on the PC. Its not a fair statement to compare consoles to PCs, but it sounds to me like Sony's flagship machine is being trounced by their own decommissioned flagship game.
Sounds like you just hired some really bad employees. Yes, we live in a capitalistic society but any employee that gets hired should have a level of knowledge that allows him to acknowledge that he is gonna get fired or his company is going to go bankrupt if he does that.
Try going to the mall, go to the games stores and talk to a few female clerks. You'll find the type I mean without that much trouble. (Might take more than one visit, but you'll meet one.)
I know every employee at both my local EBGames in my town. The last female employee they had was fired about 6 months back for cheating on her hours with her boyfriends (who was her boss.) Since then, both stores have been 100% male dominated.
Its like when you were the first person to get a SNES on the block, you ran out into the street and shouted out "Yes!!" (ok so maybe you didn't but you get the idea.) But if you look, relatively, closely at MMO communities there are always a few players who get put down in that game's history as "first person to reach the highest level", "first person to kill X uber-monster" or "X player who owns the largest and most valuable house". Or something along those lines.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if history will ever note or realize it, but people have been forming their own paper and pen RPGs privately and secretly for years now. A friend of mine has a DM who modified the rules of D&D to have new skills, spells and races complete with stats, rules and background information. Now if someone is willing to spend the time to do that, theres bound to be someone who wrote up an entire paper and pen game if paper and pen RPGs have been around that long.
Thats because the netcode for Halo 1 on the XBox is designed solely for network play on a LAN. Try playing Halo on a 3rd party net system like Gamespy arcade and the slowdown will make you feel like you're on a 36.6k modem. In you read dev diaries about Halo PC, they talk about having to rewrite the net code since it was designed for LANs originally.
"Nintendo encourages vandalism!"
This may just be a crazy theory, but maybe the RIAA "told" eBay to close the auction. After all, if the auction had gone through and people were allowed to resell songs (as long as they gave up their own -only- copy) then the RIAA would have a new set of legal arguments on hand.
One of the best possible methods would be to have all the players be logged by their CD key. Without actually buying a copy, its very hard to get one without; stealing one or hacking in the company's computers and extract a CD which about 90% of all jackasses can't do. This way players can be secretly logged and tracked by their CD key: different aliases and accounts won't matter unless the person decides to buy multiple copies for multiple computers.
If a player's CD key "karma" gets wayyy too low, (say -500 with +500 being the starting point) then he could be subject to monitoring from the system to see if his actions "go too far". (Say he camps the newbie area PKing, with a bot no less, for 6 hours.) In which case the player could have his equipment lost, player stats erased or, admittedly an extreme, have the player's CD key completely and permenantly banned.
In a way, Blizzard's Warcraft 3 does the same method. If you cheat on Battle.net, map hack, then your CD key could get banned and the only way to fix that would be to buy another copy of the game. (CD key generators won't work online, in case any of you wondered about that)
So far they've ported GTA3, GTA:VC, Midnight Club 2 and State of Emergency to the PC, GTA3 and GTA:VC, Midnight Club 2 to the XBox and Smuggler's Run:Warzones to the Gamecube. I don't know about you guys, but that sounds like a lot of games to be ported considering their coming from a developer who uses to make one system exclusive games.
(About 10 songs per CD; so $10 for a hard CD copy or $10 for a binary copy. It comes down to preferance and a hard CD copy has historically won over binary copies, for now at least.)
I think the best way to sum up the Eyetoy is that uniqueness is nice, but it doesn't always equal success (far, far too many examples to list)
As for guns on video game covers, I dare you to take a screenshot of a cut up, shot person from Soldier of Fortune 2, with gore on, print it out and show it in a public area. Its just a screenshot of the game, but I doubt you'll be able to show it to a police officer without him tailing you until you leave area.
"why not re-release DOA:Extreme Volleyball in Japan, since it's the most popular Xbox title over there, in a silver box with a hologram of one of the girls breasts bouncing up and down? "
Step one : Put girls with bouncy breasts in gameStep two : Put girls with bouncy breasts on cover
Step three : ?
Step four : Profit!
The only thing thats probably keeping Microsoft from doing this is the censorship in America. Seriously, DOA:Extreme Volleyball caught enough protest just by being released with bouncy breasts in the game, can you imagine the outcry if Little Billy saw a game with a holographic image of a girl's breasts bouncing?
Some MMO games fail to fix this problem, World War II Online suffered from extremely long distances to battles and few ways to get there quickly. Others suffer from imbalances of the use of easy respawning (my friend used to camp the exit of the beginner area and if he was killed, he just spawned out of the same exit he was camping; easy kills, nominal walking time.)
I think the underlying issue is the fact that death in gaming is too light in its punishment. Obviously, its just a game so we shouldn't take it TOO seriously and we shouldn't be penalized too harshly, but face it; when players can resort to charging the enemy with their strongest attacks only to get killed and respawn as a means of softening the enemy's HP, you know there are some spawning issues in the game. (A popular means of defeating a quest monster in MMORPGs.)
Nowadays you spend something like $50 to start playing in baseball (a glove, a ball and maybe a bat) and golf costs around $100 per person (rent the equipment). Gaming equipment on the other hand costs around $1500 and up. On top of that there is learning the game physics (for FPS games at least), the map designs (a MUST for RTS games), the balances of the units and weapons (a must for FPS games) and the clever tricks that can be used in a game (shooting through/around walls in FPSes and using underused tactics for surprise in RTSes.)
Which one sounds the most difficult to pick up on? Golf, baseball or so-called "professional gaming?"
Plop down a PC running Linux in front of 100 people for 1 hour and you'll come back finding them beating on the computer. There's a reason as to why Linux isn't mainstream (at least, not yet).
More like cheap, inexpensive mirrors. Their own site doesn't have the demo up. I guess they wanna save money and bandwidth by having other sites post it up. Goes to show how much trust management has in the game if they don't think they can spare the cash to pay bandwidth expenses.
Cars can be modified to have video game systems in them. Mini-TVs in vans and SUVs are becoming popular as well. That statement may become true in the future if wireless connections become stable enough.
Lik Sang can't sell PS1/2 mod chips anymore, correct? But can they still design and sell the manufacturing plans to other companies? Can they sell "PS1/2 Mod Chips for Dummies" books?
As much as I respect corporations doing this for more money, in the long run it defeats the purpose of a demo and hurts consumer loyality, as many people already pointed out. But another problem is partially the consumer's fault. A lot of people whine and bitch about Fileplanet's slow speeds but none of them care to note the fact that its one of the most used file sharing sites that has remained fully professional and not "outsourced" itself with mirror sites that isn't under their control. A LOT of "free" download sites really mirror to a bunch of other sites which they have no control of.
What if a Slashdotter adopts a child?
What next? Linux vs Sony flame wars?
Everquest has something like 500,000 registered users, and thats for a 4+ year old MMORPG game on the PC. Its not a fair statement to compare consoles to PCs, but it sounds to me like Sony's flagship machine is being trounced by their own decommissioned flagship game.
Blaim it on the people who chose who to hire.
I know every employee at both my local EBGames in my town. The last female employee they had was fired about 6 months back for cheating on her hours with her boyfriends (who was her boss.) Since then, both stores have been 100% male dominated.
In summary, a crimeless world/society is an unreachable utopia as long as you consider outside factors.
Its like when you were the first person to get a SNES on the block, you ran out into the street and shouted out "Yes!!" (ok so maybe you didn't but you get the idea.) But if you look, relatively, closely at MMO communities there are always a few players who get put down in that game's history as "first person to reach the highest level", "first person to kill X uber-monster" or "X player who owns the largest and most valuable house". Or something along those lines.