Here in Norway we got number portability a couple of years back. For a couple of weeks the newspapers were filled with stories of numbers going for outragous prizes. There were even specialized web sites where one could auction cell phone numbers. A couple of months later, everyone sobered and the market dried up. The whole thing was even sillier than the domain name market in the dot com era.
...but if the gaming industry wants the ones who played their games through childhood to keep playing their games, they need to improve their titles storylines A LOT. In many, many games it shines through that they probably were written by anti social nerds, barely capable of having conversations themselves, not to speak of implementing it in their games.
I am also an engineer, but my department is so small I have to do everything in my applications (mostly with browser clients). This means I have to do some design work. What I do? I surf the web, find a site that has a coherent, descrete design (nothing fancy or artsy, i have some ethics left) and i implement a similar design for my front end. I call it "getting inspiration". Btw, most of my applications look a lot like www.micorosoft.com.
..could be used for something a 100% more productive. As a developer i get summoned to all kinds of meetings. I am one of the architects behind a rather large application that we sell to our customers. The most unproductive kind of meetings i am called to are the ones involving our sales people. About 20% of my time goes to sitting in meetings with our sales staff and prospects selling the solution. These are not prestudies, they are pure sales-meetings where a short demo is run, and some fancy acronyms get passed around. When confronted by the fact that i could spend my time far more productively doing my actual job, most of them stated that they dont feel comfortable on their own with our product (its moderatly complex). So this past week i spent a couple of afternoons teaching our sales-reps the system from the ground up, in the hope that they will be able to do things on their own from now on.
The other meeting time-sink are the weekly department meetings. Specifically the part where everyone has to tell everyone else what they have been doing the last week. This consists of 1-2 hours (we are 5 employees) of mind-numbingly boring monologues from people who like to hear their own voice. Please send help.
Thanks to Kings Quest I was way ahead of my class in english lessons. I remember sitting for hours with a norwegian-english dictionary trying out different combinations of look and get .
..Because after reading their web page which betrays more than a few personality disorders in whoever wrote that pseudo-prose-documentary-crap one must wonder: Who the hell wants to be associated with that bullshit?
Furthermore i am hard pressed to see how a brand/company would benefit from having Griffin running around in a game.
Also i imagine their law #1 "We are a secretive guild and a very close team" would cause some trouble, marketing wise.
Being an avid PC gamer, this year has been very mixed. On one hand the production value of titles has continued to increase. Voice acting, musical score, sound effects etc. have made for a more "cinematic" feel to games in general (Call of Duty, Max Payne 2..) and some pretty submersive moments, like the tank attack by the church early in Call Of Duty. On the other hand however, we have seen little new in terms of gameplay. I dont play games to be an actor in some scripted movie, and thats what I felt like in many of the games last year.
The RTS scene has completely stagnated IMHO. Rise Of Nations was hailed as a "revolution" but i fail to see anything new in that title. Its the same old resource gathering, troop accumulating treadmill that we have seen for years now (yes, it has tweaks here and there, but is it THAT different from Empire Earth or Civ 3?).
Another genre that getting old fast is the Massivly Multiplayer one. It's pretty clear that the gaming industry hasent quite matured enough to bring out a game in this genre that "normal" people will play. Everquest is still number one and that game is starting to get OLD. The problem with the industy is that they look at this situation and think that in order to succeed they need to make something Everquestish, with better graphics and some new twists. This simply isnt true. Whats needed is something new, something fresh. The genre needs its Castle Wolfenstein.
The year hasnt been all bad though. Vice City, although a reiteration was fun! Freedom fighters felt fresh, allthough they could have come up with some more intersting enemies than RussianSoldier#3 and SlightlyBetterRussianSoldier#2. So please gaming industry: Give us something NEW in 2004!
Considering the game line-up this year, this is hardly suprising. Most games are either a)reiterations of a proven formula or b)resource hungry hogs 80% of the public cant run on their systems (in the case of PC titles at least).
Also the PS2 and the GC are getting pretty old. The graphics just cant keep up with the newsest PC titles anymore.
I usually buy around 20-30 games a year, but this year i only bought around 10 simply because I didnt find any games of the quality/novelty that i want.
I know this has been discussed before, but I just can't hold it in.
In a world where A LOT of people starve to death every day, other people will invest money in virtual objects that are nothing more than rows in a database or a line in flat file somewhere.
Business plan:
1) Create table CashCow(Owner char(30), Qty int(4), EntityName char(30))
2) Open paypal account
3) Profit!
Competetive gaming is still very young. Give it one generation and I think it will be as mainstream as some of the smaller media-covered sports. The penetration of games in todays youth-culture is massive. Most young people ( 18 years old) will have heard of (and most probably) played the most popular titles like Counter-strike and such. I dont think these people will quit playing when they "grow up", heck im 28 years old and i still play counter-strike 3-4 times a week. But the whole gaming thing needs to be assimilated into our lives like everything else. As it is today, only hardcore players can appreciate a good counter-strike match. Im sure if i were to watch an American Football match i would loose interest after about 5 minutes because a) I dont know anything about american football and b) american football is not part of our main-stream culture. In stead we watch people doing cross-country skiing for hours. Yes, we watch people compete in this incredibly boring sport where nothing dramatic ever happens, and we love it. Why? Because over time (i would guess 50+ years) this has become "tradition", we know a lot about cross-country skiing, we do it ourselves, and we love to watch it.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, who uses these? I got a HTC phone with one and not one day goes by that I curse the design.
As far as I understand it is not 25% smaller but its 25% of the size of the original PS2. Here are some pictures (Norwegian site)
Here in Norway we got number portability a couple of years back. For a couple of weeks the newspapers were filled with stories of numbers going for outragous prizes. There were even specialized web sites where one could auction cell phone numbers. A couple of months later, everyone sobered and the market dried up. The whole thing was even sillier than the domain name market in the dot com era.
..Women worldwide ambigous...
...but if the gaming industry wants the ones who played their games through childhood to keep playing their games, they need to improve their titles storylines A LOT. In many, many games it shines through that they probably were written by anti social nerds, barely capable of having conversations themselves, not to speak of implementing it in their games.
I am also an engineer, but my department is so small I have to do everything in my applications (mostly with browser clients). This means I have to do some design work. What I do? I surf the web, find a site that has a coherent, descrete design (nothing fancy or artsy, i have some ethics left) and i implement a similar design for my front end. I call it "getting inspiration". Btw, most of my applications look a lot like www.micorosoft.com.
I couldnt agree more, provided we actually had the reources for those kinds of positions.
..could be used for something a 100% more productive. As a developer i get summoned to all kinds of meetings. I am one of the architects behind a rather large application that we sell to our customers. The most unproductive kind of meetings i am called to are the ones involving our sales people. About 20% of my time goes to sitting in meetings with our sales staff and prospects selling the solution. These are not prestudies, they are pure sales-meetings where a short demo is run, and some fancy acronyms get passed around. When confronted by the fact that i could spend my time far more productively doing my actual job, most of them stated that they dont feel comfortable on their own with our product (its moderatly complex). So this past week i spent a couple of afternoons teaching our sales-reps the system from the ground up, in the hope that they will be able to do things on their own from now on.
The other meeting time-sink are the weekly department meetings. Specifically the part where everyone has to tell everyone else what they have been doing the last week. This consists of 1-2 hours (we are 5 employees) of mind-numbingly boring monologues from people who like to hear their own voice. Please send help.
Thanks to Kings Quest I was way ahead of my class in english lessons. I remember sitting for hours with a norwegian-english dictionary trying out different combinations of look and get .
The word "Oil" is often misintepreted as "Weapons of Mass Destruction" when written in Courier New 12.
..Because after reading their web page which betrays more than a few personality disorders in whoever wrote that pseudo-prose-documentary-crap one must wonder: Who the hell wants to be associated with that bullshit? Furthermore i am hard pressed to see how a brand/company would benefit from having Griffin running around in a game. Also i imagine their law #1 "We are a secretive guild and a very close team" would cause some trouble, marketing wise.
Being an avid PC gamer, this year has been very mixed. On one hand the production value of titles has continued to increase. Voice acting, musical score, sound effects etc. have made for a more "cinematic" feel to games in general (Call of Duty, Max Payne 2..) and some pretty submersive moments, like the tank attack by the church early in Call Of Duty. On the other hand however, we have seen little new in terms of gameplay. I dont play games to be an actor in some scripted movie, and thats what I felt like in many of the games last year.
The RTS scene has completely stagnated IMHO. Rise Of Nations was hailed as a "revolution" but i fail to see anything new in that title. Its the same old resource gathering, troop accumulating treadmill that we have seen for years now (yes, it has tweaks here and there, but is it THAT different from Empire Earth or Civ 3?).
Another genre that getting old fast is the Massivly Multiplayer one. It's pretty clear that the gaming industry hasent quite matured enough to bring out a game in this genre that "normal" people will play. Everquest is still number one and that game is starting to get OLD. The problem with the industy is that they look at this situation and think that in order to succeed they need to make something Everquestish, with better graphics and some new twists. This simply isnt true. Whats needed is something new, something fresh. The genre needs its Castle Wolfenstein.
The year hasnt been all bad though. Vice City, although a reiteration was fun! Freedom fighters felt fresh, allthough they could have come up with some more intersting enemies than RussianSoldier#3 and SlightlyBetterRussianSoldier#2. So please gaming industry: Give us something NEW in 2004!
Seems they were hacked
Considering the game line-up this year, this is hardly suprising. Most games are either a)reiterations of a proven formula or b)resource hungry hogs 80% of the public cant run on their systems (in the case of PC titles at least). Also the PS2 and the GC are getting pretty old. The graphics just cant keep up with the newsest PC titles anymore. I usually buy around 20-30 games a year, but this year i only bought around 10 simply because I didnt find any games of the quality/novelty that i want.
I know this has been discussed before, but I just can't hold it in. In a world where A LOT of people starve to death every day, other people will invest money in virtual objects that are nothing more than rows in a database or a line in flat file somewhere. Business plan: 1) Create table CashCow(Owner char(30), Qty int(4), EntityName char(30)) 2) Open paypal account 3) Profit!
Competetive gaming is still very young. Give it one generation and I think it will be as mainstream as some of the smaller media-covered sports. The penetration of games in todays youth-culture is massive. Most young people ( 18 years old) will have heard of (and most probably) played the most popular titles like Counter-strike and such. I dont think these people will quit playing when they "grow up", heck im 28 years old and i still play counter-strike 3-4 times a week. But the whole gaming thing needs to be assimilated into our lives like everything else. As it is today, only hardcore players can appreciate a good counter-strike match. Im sure if i were to watch an American Football match i would loose interest after about 5 minutes because a) I dont know anything about american football and b) american football is not part of our main-stream culture. In stead we watch people doing cross-country skiing for hours. Yes, we watch people compete in this incredibly boring sport where nothing dramatic ever happens, and we love it. Why? Because over time (i would guess 50+ years) this has become "tradition", we know a lot about cross-country skiing, we do it ourselves, and we love to watch it.
Some of the "explanations" to SCO's giant "DDOS conspiracy" here are ridiculous. Maybe its just simply true? http://news.netcraft.com/