...and I wanted to make the scoring system out of 10 rather than 100, on the grounds that stating one game is one percent better than another is absolutely insane. How can you possibly quantify something like that?
I was told in no uncertain terms by my bosses that my mag would be using percentage scores until the day it died, because "that's how the industry works." In other words, if a game didn't score at least 85% overall, you'd be on the publisher's bad books. And it's easier to for a PR guy (or your mag's own ad sales department) to beg and wheedle an extra couple of percent onto a score to tip the balance than it is to persuade someone to mark a game up from 8 to 9.
Everything is more expensive in the UK than in the States, even though wages are lower on average. Why do companies charge more for the same product over here?
Because they can.
British consumers have become numbed to paying more for less over the years, so companies clap their hands with glee at the thought of increasing their profit margins by 50% or more over the US for exactly the same product. "Oh, but you use PAL." "Oh, but you use 240 volts AC with three-prong plugs." "Oh, but you have VAT." Always the same excuses, and they're pretty much bullshit - but nobody questions them any more. We've been ground down by decades of being ripped off.
Until a few months ago when I bought a new MacBook (and had to start using Word 2004 because of the lack of Classic mode for Intel), I'd used Word 5.1 more or less every day for the better part of 14 years. It's still the fastest word processor I've ever used. Bootup in one second on a 466MHz G3 iBook? Hell yeah! In contrast, Word 2004 is the only program that regularly gives me the spinning beachball on a 2.14Ghz Core Duo.
The only thing from my point of view that Word 5.1 lacked was a live word count. If Intel Macs ran Classic, I'd still be using Word 5.1 on a daily basis.
The days of buying a CD just for the couple of good (ie, single) tracks on it are over, and Apple is entirely to thank for that. The only way to get people to buy CDs again is to do what Rick Rubin said (paraphrasing) in TFA - write an album where every song is equally good. The record industry's biggest nightmare isn't Apple and iTunes per se - it's iTunes' 30 second previews of every song on an album. If you listen to 30 seconds of a 3-4 minute song and decide you don't like it, that's a song you don't have to buy, whereas under the old system you were stuck with it, like it or not - and the record company already had your money.
Nintendo Europe is also headquartered in Germany (I've been to their offices; it's weird, because they're on an industrial estate on the outskirts of this little village in the middle of nowhere) - what happens if this creeping nannyism spreads to include killing creatures with a sword or a bow (Zelda) or shooting aliens (Metroid) or jumping on turtles (Mario)?
I remember that after a marathon session of playing Vice City, when I went out into the real world again I found myself thinking "If I did a flying dropkick, that bloke's Kawasaki would be mine!" every time a motorbike went past. And I don't even know how to ride a motorbike.
Last week I bought a T-Mobile pay-as-you-go phone for £10 ($20). No contract, and the call credit doesn't expire (which is good, because I can go a couple of months without making a call). It would even play MP3s if it were Mac-compatible - it isn't, but that's hardly a problem because I also own a thing called an 'iPod'. It's small, so far hasn't needed recharging in five days, and does the job perfectly adequately.
I can't believe that the US - supposedly the land of consumer choice - doesn't offer anything similar. Is the OP not looking hard enough, or are American phone companies really that horrible?
On the one hand, free Prince album. On the other hand, buying The Mail On Sunday, a vile, loathsome and utterly detestable right-wing rag, the Fox News of British newspapers. What to do?
This is the perfect definition of 'globalisation'. If you're a producer of a product, you get to take advantage of the lowest possible production costs wherever they may be found in the world in order to maximise your profits.
If you're a consumer of that same product, then you're fucked and have to pay whatever the producer decrees is the market price in your country. Even if that price is many multiples of the exact same product in another country (cf: Adobe software prices in the UK compared to the US, to name but one example).
I'm still waiting to hear an even vaguely plausible reason why record companies charge vastly more for a music CD, a piece of plastic and metal on which the largest production expenses - the actual recording and artists' advances - have already been paid, in the UK than to buy that same CD from Hong Kong including shipping halfway around the world other than sheer, unashamed, blatant, greedy price-gouging of British consumers. And I'll be waiting a long time, because there isn't one.
[Paraphrased from memory - it was shown a long time ago...]
Lawyer: My client can produce receipts for the allegedly stolen digital watch-
Judge: A digital watch? What on earth is a digital watch?
Lawyer: A watch which uses an electronic display rather than hands to tell the time, your honour.
Judge: I see. Proceed.
Lawyer: Furthermore, he can produce a recepit for the video recorder-
Judge: Video recorder? What on earth is a video recorder?
Lawyer: A device which records television programmes on special tape, your honour.
Judge: I see. How fascinating! What will they think of next? Proceed.
Lawyer: And finally, my client can produce a receipt for the... 'deluxe model inflatable woman', whatever that is.
Judge: The deluxe is the one with the real hair.
From TFA: The producers of the Wii version revealed to Famitsu that one of their goals is to allow families who play the Wii together to experience Resident Evil.
So, let's see - Mum, Dad, little Billy and little Sue all happily sitting around the TV... watching Leon blow the heads off villagers in a shower of gore with a shotgun before being bloodily decapitated by a chainsaw-wielding maniac. Fun for the whole family!
In the UK right now, you can walk into Game, Gamestation, Curry's, HMV... basically any of the major high street game retailers and slap down a small deposit (£20 in most shops) to be guaranteed - yes, that's what every shop window poster says, guaranteed - a PS3 on launch day.
On the other hand, you still need a deposit to get hold of a Wii, three months after launch, and there's no guarantee whatsoever of when you'll actually be able to pick the thing up.
The article is right - in the UK at least, the PS3 is a truly unwanted console. They should have waited until market penetration of HDTVs was above 1%...
Enemies who shrug off massive damage
It's (borderline) bearable in something like Doom. Who knows how a demon from Hell would react to a shotgun blast to the face? But in a game like Black, which is supposedly 'realistic', it pisses me off. If you take 10 M-16 bullets to the head at a range of four feet, you are dead, and I don't care if you happen to be wearing body armour.
Super-accurate snipers
Black again (though it's not the only example). If you can see some much as a single pixel of a bad guy, not only can they see you, but they can instantly snipe you while you're still bringing up your rifle. Fuck off.
Boss battles
Yes, I know bosses are now an unavoidable part of gaming, however much one despises them. But there's a tendency in FPS games to go for the R-Type approach - namely that some tiny and obscure weak point has to be hit repeatedly with pinpoint accuracy before the boss suffers any kind of damage, then another, then another... Come on! (Even worse are the kind where some weak point has to be hit repeatedly within a time limit, and any error resets everything.) At the very least, offer a brute force alternative - let players just hit them with everything they have. Players who find the weak point can be all smug that they saved some ammo. Everyone else can go 'Well, killed that fucking annoying obstacle. Now I can get on with the game.'
All these things have made me give up on games that I'd enjoyed up to a certain point, simply because the annoyance and frustration factor outweighed the fun. If I'm not enjoying a game, I'll stop playing it. And I sure as hell won't buy the sequel.
Having looked at the Apple site, they've made a big thing about AppleTV (ATV from here on) synching with iTunes so you can watch stuff downloaded from the iTunes Store. Here's my question - can you also watch video that didn't come from iTunes?
iTunes can't import AVIs or WMVs - at least, I've never managed to get it to do so - of which I have a whole bunch on my hard drive. (And no, they're not all downloads of 24: Day 6, some of them are legit...:p) Presumably ATV isn't going to let me watch these on my TV. So unless there's some footnote I've missed, it seems more like the function of the ATV is 'Watch stuff you've bought from the iTunes Store on your TV', which is far less exciting than it originally seemed.
Will there be a workaround to allow stuff to stream from VLC, I wonder?
This is something I seriously don't get about the latest generation of consoles. Every previous generation, one of the plus points was that once you buy the console, that's it - everything Just Works (tm Apple). Now the first thing you have to do when you switch on is download patches? WTF?
How long before the first console game that requires patches just to get rid of all the v1.0 gameplay bugs?
Well, me, for one. I have no interest whatsoever in playing online against a bunch of people I don't know or whiny 14-year-olds calling me a faggot over Xbox Live, and none of my friends are into gaming, so that just leaves single player. Fortunately there are still one-player games with a decent amount of replayability (MGS3, Resident Evil 4, GTA, KOTOR... hell, even the original Tomb Raider) - what worries me about the next-gen consoles is the increasing emphasis on online play at the potential expense of single player. If I'm paying £40 or £50 for a game, I don't want half of it to be inaccessible and therefore worthless unless I go online.
And if a console demands that I go online, even if it's just to download a system update... forget it. Surely the whole point of a console is that it's a fixed, plug and play system?
...if New Line can *start* production before the date of expiry. I can think of two examples off the top of my head of movies which were rushed into production before the film rights expired - Roger Corman's version of The Fantastic Four (which admittedly was never released), and Queen Of The Damned - made by Warner Bros, who also own New Line. I'm sure there are others.
Whether New Line would do this depends entirely on their prediction of profit vs loss. If they think enough people will go and see a Hobbit film even without Jackson for them to get a good enough return on investment, they could well rush a film into production, and let their lawyers handle Zaentz's objections.
Anyway, if we're including fictional geeks, then where the hell is Chloe O'Brian? Computer genius and uber-hacker (she busted into the NSA, remember; the only thing she can't crack is a Phoenix firewall), and she handles a mean machine gun to boot. Without her, Jack Bauer would be nothing. Nothing!
"You go first."
"No, you go first."
"No, you go first."
[Thinks] "Oh, he's letting me go."
[Thinks] "Oh, he's letting me go."
CRUNCH!
Or:
[Thinks] "I'm first to the junction, I have right of way. I'll pull out before that guy in the Vauxhall Vectra who's talking on his phone reaches it."
"'Old on, I'm at a junction, lemme just burn through-" CRUNCH! "Oh, fackin' 'ell! Some fackin' cahnt just pulled out right in front of me!"
So we get to see in a virtual world what would happen if replicator technology appeared in the real world (and *wasn't* laden with mandatory copy-protection). The capitalist economy based on supply and demand of limited resources, controlled through financial transactions, is destroyed almost immediately. Cool!
I guess the difference is that, unlike real life, in SL land can be added infinitely just by adding a new server. Not even replicators could give everyone their own luxury home on a private tropical island.
(Something this apparently does expose is the number of people in SL creating objects solely for money as opposed to those who do it for the sheer pleasure of making something they want to share with others...)
Slashdot Mirror
...and I wanted to make the scoring system out of 10 rather than 100, on the grounds that stating one game is one percent better than another is absolutely insane. How can you possibly quantify something like that?
I was told in no uncertain terms by my bosses that my mag would be using percentage scores until the day it died, because "that's how the industry works." In other words, if a game didn't score at least 85% overall, you'd be on the publisher's bad books. And it's easier to for a PR guy (or your mag's own ad sales department) to beg and wheedle an extra couple of percent onto a score to tip the balance than it is to persuade someone to mark a game up from 8 to 9.
Wasn't he in an episode of Seinfeld? "She had Guy Hands, Jerry! GUY HANDS!"
Oh, wait...
Everything is more expensive in the UK than in the States, even though wages are lower on average. Why do companies charge more for the same product over here?
Because they can.
British consumers have become numbed to paying more for less over the years, so companies clap their hands with glee at the thought of increasing their profit margins by 50% or more over the US for exactly the same product. "Oh, but you use PAL." "Oh, but you use 240 volts AC with three-prong plugs." "Oh, but you have VAT." Always the same excuses, and they're pretty much bullshit - but nobody questions them any more. We've been ground down by decades of being ripped off.
Until a few months ago when I bought a new MacBook (and had to start using Word 2004 because of the lack of Classic mode for Intel), I'd used Word 5.1 more or less every day for the better part of 14 years. It's still the fastest word processor I've ever used. Bootup in one second on a 466MHz G3 iBook? Hell yeah! In contrast, Word 2004 is the only program that regularly gives me the spinning beachball on a 2.14Ghz Core Duo.
The only thing from my point of view that Word 5.1 lacked was a live word count. If Intel Macs ran Classic, I'd still be using Word 5.1 on a daily basis.
The days of buying a CD just for the couple of good (ie, single) tracks on it are over, and Apple is entirely to thank for that. The only way to get people to buy CDs again is to do what Rick Rubin said (paraphrasing) in TFA - write an album where every song is equally good. The record industry's biggest nightmare isn't Apple and iTunes per se - it's iTunes' 30 second previews of every song on an album. If you listen to 30 seconds of a 3-4 minute song and decide you don't like it, that's a song you don't have to buy, whereas under the old system you were stuck with it, like it or not - and the record company already had your money.
Nintendo Europe is also headquartered in Germany (I've been to their offices; it's weird, because they're on an industrial estate on the outskirts of this little village in the middle of nowhere) - what happens if this creeping nannyism spreads to include killing creatures with a sword or a bow (Zelda) or shooting aliens (Metroid) or jumping on turtles (Mario)?
I remember that after a marathon session of playing Vice City, when I went out into the real world again I found myself thinking "If I did a flying dropkick, that bloke's Kawasaki would be mine!" every time a motorbike went past. And I don't even know how to ride a motorbike.
Last week I bought a T-Mobile pay-as-you-go phone for £10 ($20). No contract, and the call credit doesn't expire (which is good, because I can go a couple of months without making a call). It would even play MP3s if it were Mac-compatible - it isn't, but that's hardly a problem because I also own a thing called an 'iPod'. It's small, so far hasn't needed recharging in five days, and does the job perfectly adequately.
I can't believe that the US - supposedly the land of consumer choice - doesn't offer anything similar. Is the OP not looking hard enough, or are American phone companies really that horrible?
"Well, I say let's get out there and twat it!"
On the one hand, free Prince album. On the other hand, buying The Mail On Sunday, a vile, loathsome and utterly detestable right-wing rag, the Fox News of British newspapers. What to do?
Meh, fuck it, I don't like Prince that much.
This is the perfect definition of 'globalisation'. If you're a producer of a product, you get to take advantage of the lowest possible production costs wherever they may be found in the world in order to maximise your profits.
If you're a consumer of that same product, then you're fucked and have to pay whatever the producer decrees is the market price in your country. Even if that price is many multiples of the exact same product in another country (cf: Adobe software prices in the UK compared to the US, to name but one example).
I'm still waiting to hear an even vaguely plausible reason why record companies charge vastly more for a music CD, a piece of plastic and metal on which the largest production expenses - the actual recording and artists' advances - have already been paid, in the UK than to buy that same CD from Hong Kong including shipping halfway around the world other than sheer, unashamed, blatant, greedy price-gouging of British consumers. And I'll be waiting a long time, because there isn't one.
[Paraphrased from memory - it was shown a long time ago...]
Lawyer: My client can produce receipts for the allegedly stolen digital watch-
Judge: A digital watch? What on earth is a digital watch?
Lawyer: A watch which uses an electronic display rather than hands to tell the time, your honour.
Judge: I see. Proceed.
Lawyer: Furthermore, he can produce a recepit for the video recorder-
Judge: Video recorder? What on earth is a video recorder?
Lawyer: A device which records television programmes on special tape, your honour.
Judge: I see. How fascinating! What will they think of next? Proceed.
Lawyer: And finally, my client can produce a receipt for the... 'deluxe model inflatable woman', whatever that is.
Judge: The deluxe is the one with the real hair.
From TFA: The producers of the Wii version revealed to Famitsu that one of their goals is to allow families who play the Wii together to experience Resident Evil.
So, let's see - Mum, Dad, little Billy and little Sue all happily sitting around the TV... watching Leon blow the heads off villagers in a shower of gore with a shotgun before being bloodily decapitated by a chainsaw-wielding maniac. Fun for the whole family!
K9, who the Doctor equipped with a laser pistol
Well, technically it was a blaster, not a laser, and it was Professor Marius who equipped...
Oh god, I'm never going to get a girlfriend, am I?
In the UK right now, you can walk into Game, Gamestation, Curry's, HMV... basically any of the major high street game retailers and slap down a small deposit (£20 in most shops) to be guaranteed - yes, that's what every shop window poster says, guaranteed - a PS3 on launch day.
On the other hand, you still need a deposit to get hold of a Wii, three months after launch, and there's no guarantee whatsoever of when you'll actually be able to pick the thing up.
The article is right - in the UK at least, the PS3 is a truly unwanted console. They should have waited until market penetration of HDTVs was above 1%...
In FPS games, some of my pet hates are:
Enemies who shrug off massive damage
It's (borderline) bearable in something like Doom. Who knows how a demon from Hell would react to a shotgun blast to the face? But in a game like Black, which is supposedly 'realistic', it pisses me off. If you take 10 M-16 bullets to the head at a range of four feet, you are dead, and I don't care if you happen to be wearing body armour.
Super-accurate snipers
Black again (though it's not the only example). If you can see some much as a single pixel of a bad guy, not only can they see you, but they can instantly snipe you while you're still bringing up your rifle. Fuck off.
Boss battles
Yes, I know bosses are now an unavoidable part of gaming, however much one despises them. But there's a tendency in FPS games to go for the R-Type approach - namely that some tiny and obscure weak point has to be hit repeatedly with pinpoint accuracy before the boss suffers any kind of damage, then another, then another... Come on! (Even worse are the kind where some weak point has to be hit repeatedly within a time limit, and any error resets everything.) At the very least, offer a brute force alternative - let players just hit them with everything they have. Players who find the weak point can be all smug that they saved some ammo. Everyone else can go 'Well, killed that fucking annoying obstacle. Now I can get on with the game.'
All these things have made me give up on games that I'd enjoyed up to a certain point, simply because the annoyance and frustration factor outweighed the fun. If I'm not enjoying a game, I'll stop playing it. And I sure as hell won't buy the sequel.
If you call Westinghouse they will even send out a tech to update your firmware to fix it.
Now even TV sets not only have, but need firmware updates? Jesus tap-dancing Christ...
Having looked at the Apple site, they've made a big thing about AppleTV (ATV from here on) synching with iTunes so you can watch stuff downloaded from the iTunes Store. Here's my question - can you also watch video that didn't come from iTunes?
:p) Presumably ATV isn't going to let me watch these on my TV. So unless there's some footnote I've missed, it seems more like the function of the ATV is 'Watch stuff you've bought from the iTunes Store on your TV', which is far less exciting than it originally seemed.
iTunes can't import AVIs or WMVs - at least, I've never managed to get it to do so - of which I have a whole bunch on my hard drive. (And no, they're not all downloads of 24: Day 6, some of them are legit...
Will there be a workaround to allow stuff to stream from VLC, I wonder?
This is something I seriously don't get about the latest generation of consoles. Every previous generation, one of the plus points was that once you buy the console, that's it - everything Just Works (tm Apple). Now the first thing you have to do when you switch on is download patches? WTF?
How long before the first console game that requires patches just to get rid of all the v1.0 gameplay bugs?
Who plays single player, anyway?
Well, me, for one. I have no interest whatsoever in playing online against a bunch of people I don't know or whiny 14-year-olds calling me a faggot over Xbox Live, and none of my friends are into gaming, so that just leaves single player. Fortunately there are still one-player games with a decent amount of replayability (MGS3, Resident Evil 4, GTA, KOTOR... hell, even the original Tomb Raider) - what worries me about the next-gen consoles is the increasing emphasis on online play at the potential expense of single player. If I'm paying £40 or £50 for a game, I don't want half of it to be inaccessible and therefore worthless unless I go online.
And if a console demands that I go online, even if it's just to download a system update... forget it. Surely the whole point of a console is that it's a fixed, plug and play system?
...if New Line can *start* production before the date of expiry. I can think of two examples off the top of my head of movies which were rushed into production before the film rights expired - Roger Corman's version of The Fantastic Four (which admittedly was never released), and Queen Of The Damned - made by Warner Bros, who also own New Line. I'm sure there are others.
Whether New Line would do this depends entirely on their prediction of profit vs loss. If they think enough people will go and see a Hobbit film even without Jackson for them to get a good enough return on investment, they could well rush a film into production, and let their lawyers handle Zaentz's objections.
Hey, I know one of those geek girls! (Aleks)
Anyway, if we're including fictional geeks, then where the hell is Chloe O'Brian? Computer genius and uber-hacker (she busted into the NSA, remember; the only thing she can't crack is a Phoenix firewall), and she handles a mean machine gun to boot. Without her, Jack Bauer would be nothing. Nothing!
"You go first."
"No, you go first."
"No, you go first."
[Thinks] "Oh, he's letting me go."
[Thinks] "Oh, he's letting me go."
CRUNCH!
Or:
[Thinks] "I'm first to the junction, I have right of way. I'll pull out before that guy in the Vauxhall Vectra who's talking on his phone reaches it."
"'Old on, I'm at a junction, lemme just burn through-" CRUNCH! "Oh, fackin' 'ell! Some fackin' cahnt just pulled out right in front of me!"
So we get to see in a virtual world what would happen if replicator technology appeared in the real world (and *wasn't* laden with mandatory copy-protection). The capitalist economy based on supply and demand of limited resources, controlled through financial transactions, is destroyed almost immediately. Cool!
I guess the difference is that, unlike real life, in SL land can be added infinitely just by adding a new server. Not even replicators could give everyone their own luxury home on a private tropical island.
(Something this apparently does expose is the number of people in SL creating objects solely for money as opposed to those who do it for the sheer pleasure of making something they want to share with others...)
"Bwongg!" - everything's going fine.
"Bu-da-lah-ding, boh-dah-la-dong..." - you've got problems.
But better yet is a decent sleep mode. "..."