Has there ever been a game movie that has done well in the theaters? I sure cannot think of one. It seems like a lesson should have been learned by now...
Tomb Raider did $274,644,183 in cinemas worldwide (source: the-numbers.com) on a $94m budget, so not a bad return on investment.
This is so stupid they should have a standards board that sets an international standard.
They did. It chose HD-DVD. Unfortunately Sony decided they didn't want to play because they'd spent money developing a format that wasn't picked by the DVD Forum, so instead they spent still more millions - billions? - to push Blu-Ray instead.
And the consumers of the world said, "Wait, fuck that! You think we don't remember getting stung by VHS versus Betamax? We'll stick with our regular DVDs, thanks."
Seriously, to have a Tomb Raider game where you don't raid any tombs was just the ground-glass icing on the turd cake that was AoD. (And we got Angry Emo Lara a few years before the MySpace Prince.)
...unfortunately, on Xbox. No proper endings for me, I guess!
So frustrating, because it was a genuinely enthralling game - right up until the final world, when it all fell apart and offered up a feeble 'was that it?' ending. Yet another example, along with Tomb Raider: Angel Of Darkness, of why games and quarterly earnings targets just don't mix.
From TFA, the requirements for being a games journalist seem to have changed since I was one:
1: Are you willing to work long hours for almost no money?
2: Can you actually play games well enough to get screenshots of levels beyond the training stages?
3: Can you write? (This requirement may be optional.)
Those were pretty much the order of requirements. Games journalism (in print, certainly) is one field where actual writing ability rates far below being able to churn out tolerable copy to the required word count for the deadline.
I worked on games magazines for the better part of the 1990s, and the sheer throughput of wannabe 'games journalists' I saw in that time was quite amazing. Dozens and dozens of people. What's scary is that quite a few of those who didn't vanish entirely are there even now, some in their 40s, still playing videogames for a living on shit money for bosses who treat them with contempt. They are literal lifers, with no way out because that's all they know how to do.
There's the very occasional escapee who's made a journalistic career away from games, but anyone who thinks that becoming a videogames journalist is their stepping stone to bigger and better things is deluded. If you want to become an actual journalist, you'd be better off starting as the scut monkey on the tattiest local newspaper than as the editor of the best-selling videogames magazine in the country. You'd learn more useful career progression tips in a month than in five years of PR lunches and checkdisks.
How many eight-to-eighteens can afford $249? And how many of them have credit cards with which they can make purchases on the Zune Store, or whatever MS calls it?
Peer pressure and pester power are one thing, but there's a lot of price difference between "I want a pink iPod!" (the Nano) and "I want a 30Gb iPod!" If MS were really aiming at the school crowd, they wouldn't be doing it with a high-end and desperately uncool (brown?!?) gadget. They'd be going cheaper and with more bling. They're not selling movies - why do they need a 30Gb device anyway? Not even the Xbox 360 has that much HD space!
I wouldn't be surprised if a year from now, 'Zune' enters the teenage vernacular as something quite the opposite of MS's hopes. [Teenager tries to show off something both uncool and pointless to cool kids] Cool kid: "Cuh. That is so zune."
Well, with the brown version it's certainly got the 'ugly colour scheme' aspect of MySpace down perfectly!
There's one major difference between Zune and MySpace, though. MySpace's underlying 'philosophy' is basically "Check out what I'm into!" Zune's is "Buy what I'm into... from a major corporation!"
1. The election officials don't believe that they can re-gear the process in time for the general election, which is only 6 weeks away. I certainly don't think they can pull it off, given their record so far.
To re-gear the process for a paper ballot, they'd require:
A: A bunch of metal boxes with a slot in the top, and a padlock.
B: A slip of paper for every voter with the names and parties of the candidates printed on it.
C: Pencils. Lots of pencils.
D: A bunch of volunteers willing to count those slips of paper into piles.
Six weeks to get that sorted out? Hell, for a mere 1% of the $106m they spent on the Diebold machines I'd personally drive to every voting station in the State and hand them their boxes, papers and pencils. And I live in England. Another 1%, and I'd count the ballots myself. It might take a few weeks, or even months, to get the result, but...
Brown? Seriously? It's meant to be a cutting-edge, fetishistic techno-gadget, and they offer it in fucking brown?
Steve Jobs: "Here's our new iPod Nano! It's available in black, white, silver and shiny green and pink!"
Steve Ballmer: "Oh yeah? Well, here's Zune! It's available in black, white and this stylish turd-brown!"
Steve Jobs: "Brown, huh? You got it in beige as well? Or tweed? How about a nice Argyle pattern?"
Steve Ballmer: "Fuck YOOOOOUUUU!" [throws chair]
Good ol' MS. Always as stylish and tasteful as ever.
...would be one that you still regularly play - and enjoy - now, no matter how many years it is since its release or how primitive it may look. Which for me would give a list something like this:
1: Robotron 2084
2: Tomb Raider
3: Tempest 2000
4: Knights of the Old Republic
5: Tetris
Hmm. Only one game produced this century in there.
So for a modest investment of a couple of grand, I can see Mary Lynn Rajskub sulk and pout in full high-definition glory? I'm almost tempted!
But seriously. As much as I love Chloe and her big-screen clone, Firewall? Who the fuck do they think would be rushing out to buy this as an example of the best in high-definition viewing? "Guys! Come round to my house to watch a mediocre Harrison Ford thriller, 90% of which takes place in such exotic locations as a house and an office - in high-def!" I bet that shitty in-car greenscreen work in the last 20 minutes looks fantastic in HD...
From the lame selection of movies - in both HD-DVD and BR - so far, it's obvious that the studios are either shit-scared about eating into the profit margin of their DVD ranges, or really couldn't give a crap about HD and have been forced into launching it by the suits.
From TFA: the average mobile phone user gets a new handset every 18 months
Huh. I got my first (and so far only) mobile phone in 2000, and am still using it on the same pay-as-you-go tariff. So now in 2006, am I 16x better than average, or 16x worse?
(I know what the answer is from the phone company's perspective, of course...)
As for the iPod, I'm a Guardian reader, but this article is frankly retarded. Sales are down compared to pre-Christmas when there hasn't been a product update for a while? No shit, Sherlock! As for the idea that some people might get upset that everybody is wearing the same white earbuds... well boo fucking hoo, fashion victim. (Maybe Zune will have red earbuds.) You go find something that's demonstrably better than an iPod in every respect - including that apparently all-important fashion factor - and get back to me. I can wait.
Seriously. Who the fuck would be rushing out to spend thousands of dollars just so they could watch HD versions of shite like Hitch, Firewall, 50 First Dates, The Dukes Of Hazzard, Van Helsing, and Basic Instinct 2?
Right now, all the HD content producers - HD-DVD and Blu-Ray alike - are taking the same attitude as Paramount did when DVD first came along. Paramount was the last studio to adopt DVD - they didn't want to touch it. They were terrified that if they put "major" titles out on DVD, it would destroy their then-profitable VHS retail and DVD rental markets for those same movies. Same thing here. Where's the 'killer disc' that would have people begging to get an HD system?
Not that I care - I wouldn't mind if both BR and HD-DVD died a miserable, painful death. The whole thing has come out of the insane Wall Street demand that just being consistently profitable isn't enough - you have to increase your profits every quarter, without fail, or you're doomed. DVD is consistently profitable - unfortunately, the market is also saturated. Therefore the public must be forced to buy everything all over again in order to increase profits. Fuck that. I'll upgrade when I want to, not when some cartel says I must.
If the 'new TOS' is a success, then perhaps we will see the same thing done with Star Trek: The Next Generation which has a 20th Anniversary coming up soon.
Riiiight. TNG was shot on film, but edited on video. Yeah, think about how bad that looks when you compare a TNG episode on DVD to TOS.
To redo TNG in HD, Paramount would have to go right back to the film masters and re-edit every single episode from scratch. That's what, 176 episodes? And a lot of the visual effects - transporters, phasers, forcefields, etc - were created electronically in the editing bay, so all of those would have to be recreated from scratch as well.
The only strategy guide I've ever paid money for was the GTA: San Andreas one. Not because the game's complicated (gameplay is for all intents and purposes the same as the previous ones, with some new vehicles and tricks) but because it's so frickin' big. (And the guide is still full of mistakes - try finding all the horseshoes in Las Venturas using the map in the book and you'll be searching until the end of time.)
For everything else, there's Gamefaqs. Which I mostly use to find out how to beat bosses, because I hate, hate, hate boss battles. The whole rigmarole of 'puzzle out weak spots by repeated trial and error then shoot each of them in a specific sequence 17,000 times' is a cancer on gaming that should be carved out right now.
Well, good! Because I got fed up with Halo 2 well before the end of the game and have never been back to it since, whereas I played Halo right up to the finish, infuriating as some parts of it were.
I got the impression that all the effort in Halo 2 went into the multiplayer and the single-player game was kind of an 'oh yeah, we need to throw this thing in too'. H1 had an interesting story (in an interesting environment); H2 was just a series of events.
As far as multiplayer goes, I don't have Xbox Live; I don't want Xbox Live. I don't want to drop into a game to have a bunch of fat American teenagers call me a fag in disguised voices. To me, that's not entertainment. (YMMV.) But there seems to be this shift towards making online multiplayer the core of a lot of titles at the expense of the one-player game, and if that's going to be a continuing trend then frankly I'll be keeping my money for things that are actually, y'know, fun. Even by MS's own figures, Xbox Live players are still very much the minority of Xbox owners, so why is 40-50% of the gameplay that people are paying for only available to them?
Molyneux may not like the Wiimote, but I have to admit I'd rate Miyamoto's opinions on what makes a good game higher than Molyneux's. Especially after Molyneux's more recent, interesting-idea-let-down-by-bugs-and-rushed-execu tion titles.
Totally OT, but I once ran into Peter Molyneux at an E3 party in Atlanta. He was wandering around with a drink in his hand, looking annoyed because nobody wanted to talk to him. Kind of amusing to watch.
Slashdot Mirror
Has there ever been a game movie that has done well in the theaters? I sure cannot think of one. It seems like a lesson should have been learned by now...
Tomb Raider did $274,644,183 in cinemas worldwide (source: the-numbers.com) on a $94m budget, so not a bad return on investment.
This is so stupid they should have a standards board that sets an international standard.
They did. It chose HD-DVD. Unfortunately Sony decided they didn't want to play because they'd spent money developing a format that wasn't picked by the DVD Forum, so instead they spent still more millions - billions? - to push Blu-Ray instead.
And the consumers of the world said, "Wait, fuck that! You think we don't remember getting stung by VHS versus Betamax? We'll stick with our regular DVDs, thanks."
Seriously, to have a Tomb Raider game where you don't raid any tombs was just the ground-glass icing on the turd cake that was AoD. (And we got Angry Emo Lara a few years before the MySpace Prince.)
...unfortunately, on Xbox. No proper endings for me, I guess!
So frustrating, because it was a genuinely enthralling game - right up until the final world, when it all fell apart and offered up a feeble 'was that it?' ending. Yet another example, along with Tomb Raider: Angel Of Darkness, of why games and quarterly earnings targets just don't mix.
From TFA, the requirements for being a games journalist seem to have changed since I was one:
1: Are you willing to work long hours for almost no money?
2: Can you actually play games well enough to get screenshots of levels beyond the training stages?
3: Can you write? (This requirement may be optional.)
Those were pretty much the order of requirements. Games journalism (in print, certainly) is one field where actual writing ability rates far below being able to churn out tolerable copy to the required word count for the deadline.
I worked on games magazines for the better part of the 1990s, and the sheer throughput of wannabe 'games journalists' I saw in that time was quite amazing. Dozens and dozens of people. What's scary is that quite a few of those who didn't vanish entirely are there even now, some in their 40s, still playing videogames for a living on shit money for bosses who treat them with contempt. They are literal lifers, with no way out because that's all they know how to do.
There's the very occasional escapee who's made a journalistic career away from games, but anyone who thinks that becoming a videogames journalist is their stepping stone to bigger and better things is deluded. If you want to become an actual journalist, you'd be better off starting as the scut monkey on the tattiest local newspaper than as the editor of the best-selling videogames magazine in the country. You'd learn more useful career progression tips in a month than in five years of PR lunches and checkdisks.
How many eight-to-eighteens can afford $249? And how many of them have credit cards with which they can make purchases on the Zune Store, or whatever MS calls it?
Peer pressure and pester power are one thing, but there's a lot of price difference between "I want a pink iPod!" (the Nano) and "I want a 30Gb iPod!" If MS were really aiming at the school crowd, they wouldn't be doing it with a high-end and desperately uncool (brown?!?) gadget. They'd be going cheaper and with more bling. They're not selling movies - why do they need a 30Gb device anyway? Not even the Xbox 360 has that much HD space!
I wouldn't be surprised if a year from now, 'Zune' enters the teenage vernacular as something quite the opposite of MS's hopes. [Teenager tries to show off something both uncool and pointless to cool kids] Cool kid: "Cuh. That is so zune."
Well, with the brown version it's certainly got the 'ugly colour scheme' aspect of MySpace down perfectly!
There's one major difference between Zune and MySpace, though. MySpace's underlying 'philosophy' is basically "Check out what I'm into!" Zune's is "Buy what I'm into... from a major corporation!"
1. The election officials don't believe that they can re-gear the process in time for the general election, which is only 6 weeks away. I certainly don't think they can pull it off, given their record so far.
To re-gear the process for a paper ballot, they'd require:
A: A bunch of metal boxes with a slot in the top, and a padlock.
B: A slip of paper for every voter with the names and parties of the candidates printed on it.
C: Pencils. Lots of pencils.
D: A bunch of volunteers willing to count those slips of paper into piles.
Six weeks to get that sorted out? Hell, for a mere 1% of the $106m they spent on the Diebold machines I'd personally drive to every voting station in the State and hand them their boxes, papers and pencils. And I live in England. Another 1%, and I'd count the ballots myself. It might take a few weeks, or even months, to get the result, but...
How many people will buy a zune ?
Ok of those select few, how many have CC content they are or were planning to put on the zune ?
Is anyone's hand up?
You could have got the same result in less time by not asking the second question...
Would a new version of Aperture be big enough to qualify as a 'special' event? It would be of interest to photo pros, but hardly anyone else.
Who knows? Maybe it's the damn iPhone at last!
Wireless. More space than a Nomad. Lame.
Brown? Seriously? It's meant to be a cutting-edge, fetishistic techno-gadget, and they offer it in fucking brown?
Steve Jobs: "Here's our new iPod Nano! It's available in black, white, silver and shiny green and pink!"
Steve Ballmer: "Oh yeah? Well, here's Zune! It's available in black, white and this stylish turd-brown!"
Steve Jobs: "Brown, huh? You got it in beige as well? Or tweed? How about a nice Argyle pattern?"
Steve Ballmer: "Fuck YOOOOOUUUU!" [throws chair]
Good ol' MS. Always as stylish and tasteful as ever.
But does he have to "theeeenk in Rrrrrussian"?
...would be one that you still regularly play - and enjoy - now, no matter how many years it is since its release or how primitive it may look. Which for me would give a list something like this:
1: Robotron 2084
2: Tomb Raider
3: Tempest 2000
4: Knights of the Old Republic
5: Tetris
Hmm. Only one game produced this century in there.
I don't own any Bluetooth devices, and have no plans to get any. No adverts for me!
So for a modest investment of a couple of grand, I can see Mary Lynn Rajskub sulk and pout in full high-definition glory? I'm almost tempted!
But seriously. As much as I love Chloe and her big-screen clone, Firewall? Who the fuck do they think would be rushing out to buy this as an example of the best in high-definition viewing? "Guys! Come round to my house to watch a mediocre Harrison Ford thriller, 90% of which takes place in such exotic locations as a house and an office - in high-def!" I bet that shitty in-car greenscreen work in the last 20 minutes looks fantastic in HD...
From the lame selection of movies - in both HD-DVD and BR - so far, it's obvious that the studios are either shit-scared about eating into the profit margin of their DVD ranges, or really couldn't give a crap about HD and have been forced into launching it by the suits.
From TFA: the average mobile phone user gets a new handset every 18 months
Huh. I got my first (and so far only) mobile phone in 2000, and am still using it on the same pay-as-you-go tariff. So now in 2006, am I 16x better than average, or 16x worse?
(I know what the answer is from the phone company's perspective, of course...)
As for the iPod, I'm a Guardian reader, but this article is frankly retarded. Sales are down compared to pre-Christmas when there hasn't been a product update for a while? No shit, Sherlock! As for the idea that some people might get upset that everybody is wearing the same white earbuds... well boo fucking hoo, fashion victim. (Maybe Zune will have red earbuds.) You go find something that's demonstrably better than an iPod in every respect - including that apparently all-important fashion factor - and get back to me. I can wait.
Yup, still waiting...
McNamara wonders if video games are stigmatized because they are a mostly commercial venture.
Because movies, of course, are made for no more reason than pure artistic expression...
Unbox? Ungood.
Doubleplus ungood.
Seriously. Who the fuck would be rushing out to spend thousands of dollars just so they could watch HD versions of shite like Hitch, Firewall, 50 First Dates, The Dukes Of Hazzard, Van Helsing, and Basic Instinct 2?
Right now, all the HD content producers - HD-DVD and Blu-Ray alike - are taking the same attitude as Paramount did when DVD first came along. Paramount was the last studio to adopt DVD - they didn't want to touch it. They were terrified that if they put "major" titles out on DVD, it would destroy their then-profitable VHS retail and DVD rental markets for those same movies. Same thing here. Where's the 'killer disc' that would have people begging to get an HD system?
Not that I care - I wouldn't mind if both BR and HD-DVD died a miserable, painful death. The whole thing has come out of the insane Wall Street demand that just being consistently profitable isn't enough - you have to increase your profits every quarter, without fail, or you're doomed. DVD is consistently profitable - unfortunately, the market is also saturated. Therefore the public must be forced to buy everything all over again in order to increase profits. Fuck that. I'll upgrade when I want to, not when some cartel says I must.
If the 'new TOS' is a success, then perhaps we will see the same thing done with Star Trek: The Next Generation which has a 20th Anniversary coming up soon.
Riiiight. TNG was shot on film, but edited on video. Yeah, think about how bad that looks when you compare a TNG episode on DVD to TOS.
To redo TNG in HD, Paramount would have to go right back to the film masters and re-edit every single episode from scratch. That's what, 176 episodes? And a lot of the visual effects - transporters, phasers, forcefields, etc - were created electronically in the editing bay, so all of those would have to be recreated from scratch as well.
Never going to happen.
The only strategy guide I've ever paid money for was the GTA: San Andreas one. Not because the game's complicated (gameplay is for all intents and purposes the same as the previous ones, with some new vehicles and tricks) but because it's so frickin' big. (And the guide is still full of mistakes - try finding all the horseshoes in Las Venturas using the map in the book and you'll be searching until the end of time.)
For everything else, there's Gamefaqs. Which I mostly use to find out how to beat bosses, because I hate, hate, hate boss battles. The whole rigmarole of 'puzzle out weak spots by repeated trial and error then shoot each of them in a specific sequence 17,000 times' is a cancer on gaming that should be carved out right now.
"The new management could take the axe [sic] to Microsoft's $6.6bn of wasteful research and development expenditure."
What, so Microsoft currently pays Apple $6.6bn a year? (They are MS's R&D department, right?)
Halo 3 'Feels' Like Halo 1
Well, good! Because I got fed up with Halo 2 well before the end of the game and have never been back to it since, whereas I played Halo right up to the finish, infuriating as some parts of it were.
I got the impression that all the effort in Halo 2 went into the multiplayer and the single-player game was kind of an 'oh yeah, we need to throw this thing in too'. H1 had an interesting story (in an interesting environment); H2 was just a series of events.
As far as multiplayer goes, I don't have Xbox Live; I don't want Xbox Live. I don't want to drop into a game to have a bunch of fat American teenagers call me a fag in disguised voices. To me, that's not entertainment. (YMMV.) But there seems to be this shift towards making online multiplayer the core of a lot of titles at the expense of the one-player game, and if that's going to be a continuing trend then frankly I'll be keeping my money for things that are actually, y'know, fun. Even by MS's own figures, Xbox Live players are still very much the minority of Xbox owners, so why is 40-50% of the gameplay that people are paying for only available to them?
Molyneux may not like the Wiimote, but I have to admit I'd rate Miyamoto's opinions on what makes a good game higher than Molyneux's. Especially after Molyneux's more recent, interesting-idea-let-down-by-bugs-and-rushed-execu tion titles.
Totally OT, but I once ran into Peter Molyneux at an E3 party in Atlanta. He was wandering around with a drink in his hand, looking annoyed because nobody wanted to talk to him. Kind of amusing to watch.