### If this is what the law does (limit advertising and sale of violent games),
Germany *already* has laws that forbid sales to minors (USK ratings are: everybody, age 6, age 12, age 16, age 18). Germany also has the BPjM, which 'indexes' games, which not only restricts sales to minors, but also forbids any kind of advertisement, advertisment here has a very broad definition, meaning basically every mentioning of the game in a positive context, so you can't review the games in a game magazine and even mentioning them is problematic, having them openly available in a shop is forbidden as well (yes, this is basically censorship).
Was this new law is meant to do, is for one to apply the restriction to a lot more games then currently, so not only games with excessive violence get banned, but all games with violence (i.e. even stuff that might currently get a 'age 16' rating). Politicians however don't seem to have much of an idea what they are talking about, so its hard to guess what they actually want to restrict. And in addition to that they want to outlaw the production of such games, which would simply mean that Crytek had to leave the country or close shop.
The current talk is really way way beyond reasonable measures to protect the children (which already are in place anyway) and deep down into the crazy-territory where you seriously have to question the the sanity of the politicians.
### Why do we need legislation to protect children?
Why should we make it extra hard for parents to do their job? Simple restriction of games to minors is perfectly fine to me, it doesn't take any power out of the hands of the parents, instead it gives them some more, since all the possibly inappropriate sales have to go through them. Really nothing wrong with that and even a lot of retailers in the USA seem to agree, since they also try to enforce ESRB ratings, even without being required from the state.
Where things go crazy is when some clueless politcans want to outright ban not only the "Killerspiele", but even the production of them and that with a mandatory age restriction already in place. All that of course without ever explaining what those "Killerspiele" exactly are.
Game magazines had to destroy whole charges of their magazines because they reviewed the wrong game, which could easily happen since the BPjM reviews games after their release, not before release. So at the point the review was written it might have been legal, but not when the magazine went to print some days later. The thing to keep in mind is that advertisement doesn't refer just to a commercial on TV, but to virtually any mention of the game in a positive context, like a simple review/preview. What the BPjM does isn't just restricting sales to minors, its censoring any kind of normal reporting on the game. Its censorship at its best and yes, theoretically you might still be able to buy such a game, practically it is close to impossible, unless you import them from some other country.
Luckily things have calmed down quite a bit after the USK (Germans ESRB-like thingy) ratings got mandatory, since it got a lot more predictable which games get indexed and which don't, which before this was quite random and sometimes happen month or years after their release. But on the other side the USK ratings make the BPjM look even more then censorship. I mean why is there a need to index games when its already illegal to sell them to anybody below 18 years?
### SVN does what it does very well. What more could you really want from a centrally-managed versioning system?
Real diff and patch support (aka Changeset support). This is by far the biggest quirk I currently have with SVN and ironically its one that has basically nothing to do with the architecture itself and is more a case of "we couldn't agree on a perfect solution, so we didn't implement it at all".
And before somebody jumps and mentioned 'svn diff', yes that is producing a diff, but a very incomplete one and it also helps you nothing with the non-existing 'svn patch' problem. The thing is, there simply is no way to produce a changset from all you have done to a svn repository (file moves, deletions, permission changes, binaries, etc.) and send that to somebody else to apply it, this makes in cooperating bigger changes from people not having repository access extremely annoying. Since it boils down to having to do it completly by hand.
### I just can't understand why this guy hasn't gone away yet.
Because he is pretty damn good at finding ways to finance his movies. He might not exactly be the best director, but he certainly knows a thing or to about organizing the money.
That said, I don't consider him that bad, sure, not the best, but compared to the guys that butchered X-Men 3 his work is pure gold.
### The problem with Uwe is that he starts out with good (or at least decent) games and turns into crappy movies.
Alone in the Dark was cool back when it run on a 386 and had a character build out of 20 polygons, nobody cared about the later incarnations of it. House of the Death was a lightgun shooter, how much of a good movie do you expect from that? And BloodRayne is about a sexy girl and lots of blood, I think he adopted that fine, even so when he changed the story around a bit (which video game movie hasn't?).
I would say it was pretty much been a case of "garbage in, garbage out". And by "garbage out" I mean brainless two hours of fun. I really don't get all the Boll hate, sure, his movies might not be the best, but video game adoptions never have been.
The media is certainly to blame, but so are the gamers. If not everybody would go into total denial mode when a "Do video games affect us?" comes up, we might be a little closer to find out what video games are and are not doing to us.
Short answer: Yes. Movies and TV have however a much larger effect, thanks to much more humor. When was the last time you heard somebody quoting Simpsons? Likely not that long ago. Case closed.
### I had to listen to what was probably this story on the radio while driving to work this morning.
You should read the article, since you completly missed the point. Short summary, the article says that:
- video games do affect us (Puzzle Quest as example) - yet we have no real understanding how they affect us - that the whole discussion is limited to violence only, by both media and gamers themselves, makes it very hard to find out to have a real discussions
Trauma Center doesn't and Mario Party has problems with wide screen as well from what I have heard. Which is kind of surprising given that widescreen support isn't exactly a new thing, some N64 titles even supported it and in this generation its something that simply should be standard and enforced by Nintendo and not something that is up to the developers. Nintendo QA has really become very lax these days.
I think the main point of the Wii is neither price nor the control scheme alone, but simply its simplicity. In 30sec a consumer can understand what the Wii will do for him and how it will be fun, both of these are very successfully told trough advertisement, word of mouth and Wii Sports as the perfect demo game. With PS3 and XBox360 you really can't make a normal person understand so easily what is good about them, especially not in 30sec.
Re:Not only have I switched to a trackball...
on
Mouse or Trackball?
·
· Score: 1
Same setup here, one thing that I especially like about left-hand usage is that the trackball ends up being far closer to the hand, on the right side you always end up having that huge numblock in the way, on the left you can just place your trackball right next to the hand.
I have a Marble Mouse Man (which is a trackball) here and I am very happy with it for normal day to day usage. I especially like that I can easily move between Windows without fully grabbing the device, instead I just give the trackball a little push with the finger (requires focus-follows-mouse), which is more comfortable then a mouse. However, in terms of precision I have to agree, it doesn't really come close to a mouse and where it completly falls apart is drag&drop. Holding down a button and at the same time moving the ball just doesn't work half as good as with a mouse, its a night and day difference. Just moving and clicking is fine, but drag&drop is a total no-go, since you end up pressing the button with one part of your hand and move around the ball with the other half. Which is why I switch to the graphic tablet for anything that involves some amount of dragging and dropping (Gimp, Blender, etc.).
That number comes right from Microsoft. They never said that number directly, but they did say that they are going to spend one billion to handle the defects, given that 10 million XBox360 are released into the wild, just do the math and you will see that the failure rate is between 25%-70%, the lowest end is when a repair cost as much as a brand new XBox360, $400, the high end assume that it cost them $140 to repair one, the price they charged for out-of-warranty repairs. The ~30% failure rate was also independently confirmed by a few retailers.
One of the key points that makes the XO laptop so interesting is that it can be used as a eBook Reader, this thing just looks like a normal laptop, not very comfortable for eBook reading, I'll pass.
We are not doomed to play games with shallow female leads, its worse, we are doomed to play shallow games. Male leads really aren't an inch better then the female ones, the bad guys aren't the deepest guys in the world either and the rest of the story often is just as forgettable. Its certainly nothing to be happy about, but thats just the way it currently is (yes, I miss those adventures of old days too...).
I doubt we will ever see genuine female leads in games which main purpose is to slash through hordes of thousands of bad guys, it just wouldn't fit very well. To fix that problem we would first need games that focus less on killing and more on things.
It is already there and it is called Windows. Its not OpenSource, but the SDKs are freely available and there no restriction on what you can do with it. Well, maybe a bit deep down in the EULA, but nothing that stops you from AO, you don't even need a rating in the first place.
While we are at the topic of arcade cabinets, does anybody have a good recommendation for an simple arcade stick for those that just want to play games on their PC without building their own cabinet?
I would go as far as to say that fixed stories are actually a rather new thing, thanks to printing press and movies that allow to keep them in an hard to modify state, before that, they might have changed each time they got told, since they only existed in the tellers mind and not word for word recorded on paper.
### Just look at Metroid Prime. It has a pretty good story line.
One that is told through a bunch of post-its that are all over the world and is almost completly disconnected from actual gameplay. Heck, I played through the whole game and couldn't tell you a thing about what was going on in that story, since I simply had zero interest to actually read that post-it mess. If that is good storytelling, they better just print all that stuff out, bundle it into a book and ship that with a game. From good storytelling in a game, I expect it to actually happen in the game, not in the pause screen.
You want a definition of "hardcore", how about something very simple: Games that are liked by gamers. How do we find out which ones that are? Lets have a look at the popular review sites, not just one (biased) one, but one of those pages that build average scores out of many review sites:
A impressive number of 7 games above 80%, two of them Gamecube ports, one a port of a DS game, one a port of a PSP game, one is Madden and the remaining ones are WarioWare and PaperMario. Sorry, but by no stretch of imagination that can be called impressive. The PS3 with its terribly lacking games line-up has more then twice as much above-80% games and even the N-Gage comes out better.
You might call all those reviews biased, since they certainly don't match the casual gamer taste and you might be right (see Wii Sports), but then, thats the point. The Wii caters to a new audience and has basically completly abandoned the normal gamer population.
And about "give it time", well, thats exactly what I do, as soon as enough good games are out for it, I'll buy one, but I don't expect that to be anytime soon, if ever before the end of this generation.
Slashdot Mirror
### If this is what the law does (limit advertising and sale of violent games),
Germany *already* has laws that forbid sales to minors (USK ratings are: everybody, age 6, age 12, age 16, age 18). Germany also has the BPjM, which 'indexes' games, which not only restricts sales to minors, but also forbids any kind of advertisement, advertisment here has a very broad definition, meaning basically every mentioning of the game in a positive context, so you can't review the games in a game magazine and even mentioning them is problematic, having them openly available in a shop is forbidden as well (yes, this is basically censorship).
Was this new law is meant to do, is for one to apply the restriction to a lot more games then currently, so not only games with excessive violence get banned, but all games with violence (i.e. even stuff that might currently get a 'age 16' rating). Politicians however don't seem to have much of an idea what they are talking about, so its hard to guess what they actually want to restrict. And in addition to that they want to outlaw the production of such games, which would simply mean that Crytek had to leave the country or close shop.
The current talk is really way way beyond reasonable measures to protect the children (which already are in place anyway) and deep down into the crazy-territory where you seriously have to question the the sanity of the politicians.
### Why do we need legislation to protect children?
Why should we make it extra hard for parents to do their job? Simple restriction of games to minors is perfectly fine to me, it doesn't take any power out of the hands of the parents, instead it gives them some more, since all the possibly inappropriate sales have to go through them. Really nothing wrong with that and even a lot of retailers in the USA seem to agree, since they also try to enforce ESRB ratings, even without being required from the state.
Where things go crazy is when some clueless politcans want to outright ban not only the "Killerspiele", but even the production of them and that with a mandatory age restriction already in place. All that of course without ever explaining what those "Killerspiele" exactly are.
### I don't this this could be called censorship.
Game magazines had to destroy whole charges of their magazines because they reviewed the wrong game, which could easily happen since the BPjM reviews games after their release, not before release. So at the point the review was written it might have been legal, but not when the magazine went to print some days later. The thing to keep in mind is that advertisement doesn't refer just to a commercial on TV, but to virtually any mention of the game in a positive context, like a simple review/preview. What the BPjM does isn't just restricting sales to minors, its censoring any kind of normal reporting on the game. Its censorship at its best and yes, theoretically you might still be able to buy such a game, practically it is close to impossible, unless you import them from some other country.
Luckily things have calmed down quite a bit after the USK (Germans ESRB-like thingy) ratings got mandatory, since it got a lot more predictable which games get indexed and which don't, which before this was quite random and sometimes happen month or years after their release. But on the other side the USK ratings make the BPjM look even more then censorship. I mean why is there a need to index games when its already illegal to sell them to anybody below 18 years?
### SVN does what it does very well. What more could you really want from a centrally-managed versioning system?
Real diff and patch support (aka Changeset support). This is by far the biggest quirk I currently have with SVN and ironically its one that has basically nothing to do with the architecture itself and is more a case of "we couldn't agree on a perfect solution, so we didn't implement it at all".
And before somebody jumps and mentioned 'svn diff', yes that is producing a diff, but a very incomplete one and it also helps you nothing with the non-existing 'svn patch' problem. The thing is, there simply is no way to produce a changset from all you have done to a svn repository (file moves, deletions, permission changes, binaries, etc.) and send that to somebody else to apply it, this makes in cooperating bigger changes from people not having repository access extremely annoying. Since it boils down to having to do it completly by hand.
### I just can't understand why this guy hasn't gone away yet.
Because he is pretty damn good at finding ways to finance his movies. He might not exactly be the best director, but he certainly knows a thing or to about organizing the money.
That said, I don't consider him that bad, sure, not the best, but compared to the guys that butchered X-Men 3 his work is pure gold.
### The problem with Uwe is that he starts out with good (or at least decent) games and turns into crappy movies.
Alone in the Dark was cool back when it run on a 386 and had a character build out of 20 polygons, nobody cared about the later incarnations of it. House of the Death was a lightgun shooter, how much of a good movie do you expect from that? And BloodRayne is about a sexy girl and lots of blood, I think he adopted that fine, even so when he changed the story around a bit (which video game movie hasn't?).
I would say it was pretty much been a case of "garbage in, garbage out". And by "garbage out" I mean brainless two hours of fun. I really don't get all the Boll hate, sure, his movies might not be the best, but video game adoptions never have been.
Question from somebody not living in the USA: Why is banning porn ok and banning violence a violation of the Constitution?
The media is certainly to blame, but so are the gamers. If not everybody would go into total denial mode when a "Do video games affect us?" comes up, we might be a little closer to find out what video games are and are not doing to us.
Short answer: Yes. Movies and TV have however a much larger effect, thanks to much more humor. When was the last time you heard somebody quoting Simpsons? Likely not that long ago. Case closed.
### I had to listen to what was probably this story on the radio while driving to work this morning.
You should read the article, since you completly missed the point. Short summary, the article says that:
- video games do affect us (Puzzle Quest as example)
- yet we have no real understanding how they affect us
- that the whole discussion is limited to violence only, by both media and gamers themselves, makes it very hard to find out to have a real discussions
Trauma Center doesn't and Mario Party has problems with wide screen as well from what I have heard. Which is kind of surprising given that widescreen support isn't exactly a new thing, some N64 titles even supported it and in this generation its something that simply should be standard and enforced by Nintendo and not something that is up to the developers. Nintendo QA has really become very lax these days.
I think the main point of the Wii is neither price nor the control scheme alone, but simply its simplicity. In 30sec a consumer can understand what the Wii will do for him and how it will be fun, both of these are very successfully told trough advertisement, word of mouth and Wii Sports as the perfect demo game. With PS3 and XBox360 you really can't make a normal person understand so easily what is good about them, especially not in 30sec.
### You can't "easily correct" GPL violations: once you screw up, the GPL doesn't apply to you anymore, no matter what you do.
Where the heck did you get that from?
Online play isn't confirmed yet as far as I know.
Same setup here, one thing that I especially like about left-hand usage is that the trackball ends up being far closer to the hand, on the right side you always end up having that huge numblock in the way, on the left you can just place your trackball right next to the hand.
I have a Marble Mouse Man (which is a trackball) here and I am very happy with it for normal day to day usage. I especially like that I can easily move between Windows without fully grabbing the device, instead I just give the trackball a little push with the finger (requires focus-follows-mouse), which is more comfortable then a mouse. However, in terms of precision I have to agree, it doesn't really come close to a mouse and where it completly falls apart is drag&drop. Holding down a button and at the same time moving the ball just doesn't work half as good as with a mouse, its a night and day difference. Just moving and clicking is fine, but drag&drop is a total no-go, since you end up pressing the button with one part of your hand and move around the ball with the other half. Which is why I switch to the graphic tablet for anything that involves some amount of dragging and dropping (Gimp, Blender, etc.).
### 35% failure rate is total bull.
That number comes right from Microsoft. They never said that number directly, but they did say that they are going to spend one billion to handle the defects, given that 10 million XBox360 are released into the wild, just do the math and you will see that the failure rate is between 25%-70%, the lowest end is when a repair cost as much as a brand new XBox360, $400, the high end assume that it cost them $140 to repair one, the price they charged for out-of-warranty repairs. The ~30% failure rate was also independently confirmed by a few retailers.
One of the key points that makes the XO laptop so interesting is that it can be used as a eBook Reader, this thing just looks like a normal laptop, not very comfortable for eBook reading, I'll pass.
We are not doomed to play games with shallow female leads, its worse, we are doomed to play shallow games. Male leads really aren't an inch better then the female ones, the bad guys aren't the deepest guys in the world either and the rest of the story often is just as forgettable. Its certainly nothing to be happy about, but thats just the way it currently is (yes, I miss those adventures of old days too...).
I doubt we will ever see genuine female leads in games which main purpose is to slash through hordes of thousands of bad guys, it just wouldn't fit very well. To fix that problem we would first need games that focus less on killing and more on things.
A lot of Wii users never were in their userbase to begin with, so I hardly would call it 'detached'. Wii is catering to a new audience.
It is already there and it is called Windows. Its not OpenSource, but the SDKs are freely available and there no restriction on what you can do with it. Well, maybe a bit deep down in the EULA, but nothing that stops you from AO, you don't even need a rating in the first place.
While we are at the topic of arcade cabinets, does anybody have a good recommendation for an simple arcade stick for those that just want to play games on their PC without building their own cabinet?
Somebody better tell that to all those parents that tell their childs interactive bed time stories.
I would go as far as to say that fixed stories are actually a rather new thing, thanks to printing press and movies that allow to keep them in an hard to modify state, before that, they might have changed each time they got told, since they only existed in the tellers mind and not word for word recorded on paper.
### Just look at Metroid Prime. It has a pretty good story line.
One that is told through a bunch of post-its that are all over the world and is almost completly disconnected from actual gameplay. Heck, I played through the whole game and couldn't tell you a thing about what was going on in that story, since I simply had zero interest to actually read that post-it mess. If that is good storytelling, they better just print all that stuff out, bundle it into a book and ship that with a game. From good storytelling in a game, I expect it to actually happen in the game, not in the pause screen.
### you haven't defined.
You want a definition of "hardcore", how about something very simple: Games that are liked by gamers. How do we find out which ones that are? Lets have a look at the popular review sites, not just one (biased) one, but one of those pages that build average scores out of many review sites:
http://www.metacritic.com/games/wii/scores/
A impressive number of 7 games above 80%, two of them Gamecube ports, one a port of a DS game, one a port of a PSP game, one is Madden and the remaining ones are WarioWare and PaperMario. Sorry, but by no stretch of imagination that can be called impressive. The PS3 with its terribly lacking games line-up has more then twice as much above-80% games and even the N-Gage comes out better.
You might call all those reviews biased, since they certainly don't match the casual gamer taste and you might be right (see Wii Sports), but then, thats the point. The Wii caters to a new audience and has basically completly abandoned the normal gamer population.
And about "give it time", well, thats exactly what I do, as soon as enough good games are out for it, I'll buy one, but I don't expect that to be anytime soon, if ever before the end of this generation.