Alternatively they could cut it out for the American market and sell it as it was created in Europe
Fahrenheit did that, but that is the only game I know of that did that. Most other games censor themselves from the start, as its easier to do one game, then two slightly different ones.
where many popular games are given the highest 18+ rating and are still sold in shops.
The highest rating in Europe isn't 18+, thats just the highest rating you get from the rating organizations, many countries have additional laws for banning games (in Germany its: 0, 6, 12, 16, 18, indexed, banned), which causes the games to be just as absent from the store selves as an AO game in the USA. The real advantage that you have in Europe is that sex in games won't get you near an 18+ or worse rating in the first place, Fahrenheit was 16, stuff like Lula 3D is 16 and nobody cared about Hot Coffee to begin with, thats all AO in the USA.
There are AO games, porn games and Henai games which have sex and they don't sell in any kind of high numbers.
AO != porn. The whole crux of the current situation is that games are rated harder then movies. The sex scene that gives you an R in movies, gives you an AO in games. And as there certainly is a big market for R rated movies, so why shouldn't there be one for the same content in games?
Did Mass Effect contain sex? Not really, a little stuff shown from the side and cut together so that you couldn't see anything at all. In terms of nudity I think God of War got away with a good bit more and Fahrenheit so far seems to have had the most sex and full frontal nudity of any mainstream game, but then it was only was released uncensored to Europe, the USA got the censored version.
The lack of sex has little to do with first amendment as its pretty much all based on the self censorship the industry is doing via the ESRB.
A game that contains sex gets rated AO by the ESRB and AO means that it won't be allowed to make it on either Nintendo's, Sony's or Microsoft's console. There is still the PC market, but Walmart and other shops won't carry AO either. So AO pretty much results in a game that you can't sell, so everybody avoids it as good as they can, meaning no sex in games.
X-Wing, yes, TIE-Fighter not that much, and X-Wing wasn't half as action crazy as you describe it, in fact most reviews complained about how slow it was.
Further, the ship "cockpits" contain a whole lot of info in very little space, and I'm not sure it would work on a TV.
Um, have you had a look at a TV in the last few years? Those things can give you 720p, which is a little bit more then those 200p that X-Wing ran at.
And as said, if gamepad isn't enough a headset, chatpad or USB keyboard is always an option and also in a single player game you could pause the action if necessary, in fact having the ability to look at and change instruments while paused is a pretty standard feature in PC flightsims.
It'd be 100% impossible to translate the game to the X-Box 360 or PS3
Todays gamepads have plenty of buttons, add a few pie-menus into the mix and it shouldn't be that hard to recreate pretty much all the functionality. And if that isn't enough for some reason one could even go a little bit more crazy and throw in a headset with voice recognition and a chatpad or a plain USB keyboard. If you want to see an impressive conversion of a complex game, have a look at Operation Flashpoint for the Xbox1, that worked extremely well with just a normal Xbox gamepad, thanks to a clever menu structure that could be navigated with the dpad.
In the case of the iPhone it would be a good bit more troublesome, but with decent use of the touchscreen, you might be able to include a lot of functionality directly on-screen. One thing that I would love to see is a spacesim on the DS, where the bottom screen is used for instruments and additional controls, while the upper one is the view out of the cockpit, as far as I know that hasn't happened yet, but it would be completly possible.
Anyway, the real trouble in porting/creating those games aren't the controls, but simply sales. Publishers these days focus on the mainstream and the mainstream doesn't like complex stuff. Even on the PC those types of games have been dead for pretty a decade.
Natal isn't a Wiimote like thing. Unlike the Wiimote Natal doesn't have an analogstick or buttons, it has no controller at all, so you end up with not only having to replacing some actions with waggle, but you are being forced to replace everything with fully body waggle, making Natal pretty much unusable for any even half serious gaming.
Natal at this point in time looks like a solution looking for a problem. So far I have seen not a single half decent game concept or techdemo using Natal and I somehow doubt that this will ever change, unless Microsoft adds a Wiimote-like controller into the mix, that would provide the much needed buttons and analogsticks.
VR gloves in consumer hands are nothing new. First there was the Nintendo Powerglove and then a while later there was the P5 Glove for the PC and soon to be there is Microsofts Natal, which works completly without gloves and instead just with a camera.
I really don't see anything special about this, especially since the price falls in into the fucking expensive category and not into one where it is interesting for the average consumers.
It might not convince the weirdos, but it debunks the most plausible part of their story. I always found the whole situation with having having landed men on the moon, 40 years ago, to be rather uneasy when today we don't even have tech to make a picture of the landing site. There are of course perfectly good reasons for it, but being used to having technology advance, a 40 year not-been-to-the-moon gap just doesn't sound right, especially when we have perfectly fine pictures of Mars and the stuff we landed there.
Have you ever watched a 7 season TV series on DVD non-stop? It pretty much means you sit in front of the TV for a week and is quite a reality distorting experience. To tackle it from another side: Ever played Tetris or another pattern based games for a long while? You start to recognize those same patterns all over the real world.
It's still a VIDEO SCREEN, not REALITY.
He is talking about 2050, where you likely have a much improved version of something like Natal, the VR helmets might be back as well and you might have smell-o-vision. It doesn't have to be 100% real to affect your behavior.
Gamepads suck for first person shooters and flight sims, obviously.
They actually work quite fine for flightsims, as todays controller have more then enough axis, precision and even enough buttons when you throw a chatpad into the mix, the only trouble is that you won't find a flightsim optimized for them. As the flightsim genre is pretty dead on PC and never existed for consoles in the first place.
Why Nintendo put it like that in new classic controller then? They are suddenly "misjudged"?
The Classic Controller is focused on SNES games, thus all the dpad and buttons are in the location where they where on the SNES, leaving only the button two spots for the analogsticks.
The thing that really counts is the plot and the game-play.
Yeah, but physics changes and enhances gameplay, as it allows the environment to react dynamically, instead of just in the few ways the designer intended. When done right, physics give you a more believable and interactive world. Of course when done wrong you end up with a stupid gimmick that is fun for five minutes and then gets boring.
So you've either got arbitrary restrictions or arbitrary game ending scenarios because I just happened to collapse a skyscraper or fourty that the plot needs.
Well, do it like in the real world. If the bad guys headquarter gets blown up before some story mission, relocate him to a different building. Its not like reality stops working just because some building gets blown up, people work around it, construction workers repair it, police mean jail the person who did it and so on, a video game can do much of the same, especially when it is an open world game to begin with. Its also a simple matter of economy, blowing up big stuff requires lots of explosives, simply don't give the player a way to obtain them or just rebuild stuff on the right side of the map, while the player is blowing stuff up on the left. A single player can't level a whole world.
Definitively a big NO to that. Mandatory registration would mean that everybody who couldn't afford a lawyer would have no copyright at all and would be open for abuse by big media companies. The lack of registrations puts everybody on equal footing, as it ensures that everybody has copyright, not just those who understand the laws in detail.
Seriously, NASA (and most space programs in general) should have one crucial long term goal: Getting us off this ball of rock and inhabiting other ones.
True, but "long term" here means hundreds or thousands of years. For the time being earth is and will continue for quite a long while, to be by far the best place to life for us. Even an earth that was hit by an asteroid is still a much friendlier place to life on then any other known planet reachable by our current technology. If you worry about long term survival of the human race you would do much better building a few self-contained bunker on earth then a habitat on moon or mars, as the later ones have close to zero long term survival chances when supply from earth stops.
Why would you want to chose it every time? Being able to see the password is something you should do for debugging purpose when your password isn't recognized, not as a standard practice.
than they can see your fingers type they characters of your password on the keyboard
Have you ever tried that? Unless you practice it a good bit you are quite unlikely to succeed, you also have to have a good stare at the keyboard which could be easily noticed by the user. Having the password clearly readable on the screen is a whole different matter. People are trained to recognize words quite literally in the blink of an eye. So any non-trivial password is very easy to spot when its written to the screen, even from a distance when you are not actually trying to read it you could spot it just by accident, as you can't stop your brain from recognizing words.
The argument with the keyboard logger really isn't a good one. Sure, obscuring the password won't stop all attacks, but it will stop a lot of attacks and raise the bar for attack much higher, as you have to actually plan the attack and not just look at the screen at the right moment by accident.
That said, an option on the entry-box to de-obscure the password would be welcome, since some are just a chore to type without visual confirmation (long WLAN keys and such).
I don't think a zooming interface needs a lot of CPU if done right
You underestimate the problem. The OLPC is quite slow, has very large screen (1200x900) and no hardware acceleration to speak about, so it isn't even fast enough to do fullscreen refreshes at good framerates, let alone draw anything half complex while doing so. So a zooming interface, which does fullscreen refreshes a lot, really isn't exactly the most speedy way to do an interface there.
but it's hardly the best way to select between a small number of other users that you may actually be interacting with on a daily basis.
Sugar has both the global view of everybody, as well as a local view of just your friends.
An clickable set of photos of those users (maybe with online indication shown too), displayed on a single page regardless of their physical location, would be much nicer and more productive to use.
Sure, but it could be easily abused and would add additional complexity.
is cute, but seems more designed for a Movie than for actual use
Why that? It is very simple and easy to understand and most importantly it does something that your normal OS can't even do, as other OSs aren't build with group work in mind.
The biggest problem I have with the Sugar interface is that all that talk about zooming interface sound cool, but only till you realize that the OLPC isn't exactly a powerful machine. The machine is just to slow for fluid full screen animation, so every animation that Sugar does, looks kind of jerky and broken on a real machine and it would be much better to have a fast interface, then one that tries things the hardware just can't do.
that most people who make video games are technicians rather than artists.
I kind of doubt it, think the real problem is simply that most people who makes video games these days are gamers and have been for all their life. Video games these days are way to much driven by other video games, instead of being driven by culture in the broader sense. Which is why you get a tons and tons of games with the same themes and gameplay elements, while hardly anybody ever tries anything outside of established video games conventions. Even the indie crowd doesn't help here, as half there stuff these days is just a 2D physics engine with some minimal art thrown around it.
I would like to see some more games that start out with a topic and then figure out a way to implement it as a game, instead of starting out with a video game genre and then trying to figure out which theme to apply to it.
As it is video games are still lightyears away from books and movies when it comes to the variety of topics they cover. It of course doesn't have to stay that way, but the way the industry works these days I have some doubt about any radical changes anytime soon.
Imagine for a moment that your DVD player didn't have a fast forward button, after all you should watch the movie, not skip through it to the end for instant satisfaction.
Doesn't sound to great, does it? With video games its the same thing. Sure a challenging game is fun, but being forced to play through those challenging parts is not. It should be the users choice of how he wants to enjoy the game and if books and movies are any indication, it works quite fine when the user has instant access to the end of it.
The only real trouble I see with this is that games have progression, you learn skills in earlier levels to use them in later ones. So if you skip those learning parts, because you find them to hard, you mind end up being even more screwed later on, as you haven't learned how to play the game, thus a hard game becomes an impossible one.
But in the end: You payed for the game, so you should have the right to see all of it, if cheats and autoplay allow that, so be it.
The difference between Sonys and Microsofts motion controls is that Sony actually demonstrated useful gameplay. FPS, RTS, sword fighting, tennis, golf, graffiti and many more are rather trivial to implement with Sonys solution as shown by their tech demo. What did Microsoft on the other side show? Splattering color on a wall? Great, but where is the precision in that? Fully-Body-Waggle Breakout, well party fun, sure, but isn't really useful as a general game mechanic. And then Burnout, well, sure it might work, but where is the advantage over using a controller or if I care, a real racing wheel controller? Natal just doesn't seem all to useful outside from a few party games and most of the useful things it could do (face and voice recognition) could be done as well with existing technology, i.e. a normal camera and a headset.
Slashdot Mirror
Alternatively they could cut it out for the American market and sell it as it was created in Europe
Fahrenheit did that, but that is the only game I know of that did that. Most other games censor themselves from the start, as its easier to do one game, then two slightly different ones.
where many popular games are given the highest 18+ rating and are still sold in shops.
The highest rating in Europe isn't 18+, thats just the highest rating you get from the rating organizations, many countries have additional laws for banning games (in Germany its: 0, 6, 12, 16, 18, indexed, banned), which causes the games to be just as absent from the store selves as an AO game in the USA. The real advantage that you have in Europe is that sex in games won't get you near an 18+ or worse rating in the first place, Fahrenheit was 16, stuff like Lula 3D is 16 and nobody cared about Hot Coffee to begin with, thats all AO in the USA.
There are AO games, porn games and Henai games which have sex and they don't sell in any kind of high numbers.
AO != porn. The whole crux of the current situation is that games are rated harder then movies. The sex scene that gives you an R in movies, gives you an AO in games. And as there certainly is a big market for R rated movies, so why shouldn't there be one for the same content in games?
Did Mass Effect contain sex? Not really, a little stuff shown from the side and cut together so that you couldn't see anything at all. In terms of nudity I think God of War got away with a good bit more and Fahrenheit so far seems to have had the most sex and full frontal nudity of any mainstream game, but then it was only was released uncensored to Europe, the USA got the censored version.
The lack of sex has little to do with first amendment as its pretty much all based on the self censorship the industry is doing via the ESRB.
A game that contains sex gets rated AO by the ESRB and AO means that it won't be allowed to make it on either Nintendo's, Sony's or Microsoft's console. There is still the PC market, but Walmart and other shops won't carry AO either. So AO pretty much results in a game that you can't sell, so everybody avoids it as good as they can, meaning no sex in games.
Uh, have you played X-Wing or TIE Fighter?
X-Wing, yes, TIE-Fighter not that much, and X-Wing wasn't half as action crazy as you describe it, in fact most reviews complained about how slow it was.
Further, the ship "cockpits" contain a whole lot of info in very little space, and I'm not sure it would work on a TV.
Um, have you had a look at a TV in the last few years? Those things can give you 720p, which is a little bit more then those 200p that X-Wing ran at.
And as said, if gamepad isn't enough a headset, chatpad or USB keyboard is always an option and also in a single player game you could pause the action if necessary, in fact having the ability to look at and change instruments while paused is a pretty standard feature in PC flightsims.
It'd be 100% impossible to translate the game to the X-Box 360 or PS3
Todays gamepads have plenty of buttons, add a few pie-menus into the mix and it shouldn't be that hard to recreate pretty much all the functionality. And if that isn't enough for some reason one could even go a little bit more crazy and throw in a headset with voice recognition and a chatpad or a plain USB keyboard. If you want to see an impressive conversion of a complex game, have a look at Operation Flashpoint for the Xbox1, that worked extremely well with just a normal Xbox gamepad, thanks to a clever menu structure that could be navigated with the dpad.
In the case of the iPhone it would be a good bit more troublesome, but with decent use of the touchscreen, you might be able to include a lot of functionality directly on-screen. One thing that I would love to see is a spacesim on the DS, where the bottom screen is used for instruments and additional controls, while the upper one is the view out of the cockpit, as far as I know that hasn't happened yet, but it would be completly possible.
Anyway, the real trouble in porting/creating those games aren't the controls, but simply sales. Publishers these days focus on the mainstream and the mainstream doesn't like complex stuff. Even on the PC those types of games have been dead for pretty a decade.
Natal isn't a Wiimote like thing. Unlike the Wiimote Natal doesn't have an analogstick or buttons, it has no controller at all, so you end up with not only having to replacing some actions with waggle, but you are being forced to replace everything with fully body waggle, making Natal pretty much unusable for any even half serious gaming.
Natal at this point in time looks like a solution looking for a problem. So far I have seen not a single half decent game concept or techdemo using Natal and I somehow doubt that this will ever change, unless Microsoft adds a Wiimote-like controller into the mix, that would provide the much needed buttons and analogsticks.
VR gloves in consumer hands are nothing new. First there was the Nintendo Powerglove and then a while later there was the P5 Glove for the PC and soon to be there is Microsofts Natal, which works completly without gloves and instead just with a camera.
I really don't see anything special about this, especially since the price falls in into the fucking expensive category and not into one where it is interesting for the average consumers.
It might not convince the weirdos, but it debunks the most plausible part of their story. I always found the whole situation with having having landed men on the moon, 40 years ago, to be rather uneasy when today we don't even have tech to make a picture of the landing site. There are of course perfectly good reasons for it, but being used to having technology advance, a 40 year not-been-to-the-moon gap just doesn't sound right, especially when we have perfectly fine pictures of Mars and the stuff we landed there.
And you know this for a fact?
Have you ever watched a 7 season TV series on DVD non-stop? It pretty much means you sit in front of the TV for a week and is quite a reality distorting experience. To tackle it from another side: Ever played Tetris or another pattern based games for a long while? You start to recognize those same patterns all over the real world.
It's still a VIDEO SCREEN, not REALITY.
He is talking about 2050, where you likely have a much improved version of something like Natal, the VR helmets might be back as well and you might have smell-o-vision. It doesn't have to be 100% real to affect your behavior.
Gamepads suck for first person shooters and flight sims, obviously.
They actually work quite fine for flightsims, as todays controller have more then enough axis, precision and even enough buttons when you throw a chatpad into the mix, the only trouble is that you won't find a flightsim optimized for them. As the flightsim genre is pretty dead on PC and never existed for consoles in the first place.
Why Nintendo put it like that in new classic controller then? They are suddenly "misjudged"?
The Classic Controller is focused on SNES games, thus all the dpad and buttons are in the location where they where on the SNES, leaving only the button two spots for the analogsticks.
The thing that really counts is the plot and the game-play.
Yeah, but physics changes and enhances gameplay, as it allows the environment to react dynamically, instead of just in the few ways the designer intended. When done right, physics give you a more believable and interactive world. Of course when done wrong you end up with a stupid gimmick that is fun for five minutes and then gets boring.
So you've either got arbitrary restrictions or arbitrary game ending scenarios because I just happened to collapse a skyscraper or fourty that the plot needs.
Well, do it like in the real world. If the bad guys headquarter gets blown up before some story mission, relocate him to a different building. Its not like reality stops working just because some building gets blown up, people work around it, construction workers repair it, police mean jail the person who did it and so on, a video game can do much of the same, especially when it is an open world game to begin with. Its also a simple matter of economy, blowing up big stuff requires lots of explosives, simply don't give the player a way to obtain them or just rebuild stuff on the right side of the map, while the player is blowing stuff up on the left. A single player can't level a whole world.
with mandatory registration,
Definitively a big NO to that. Mandatory registration would mean that everybody who couldn't afford a lawyer would have no copyright at all and would be open for abuse by big media companies. The lack of registrations puts everybody on equal footing, as it ensures that everybody has copyright, not just those who understand the laws in detail.
Seriously, NASA (and most space programs in general) should have one crucial long term goal: Getting us off this ball of rock and inhabiting other ones.
True, but "long term" here means hundreds or thousands of years. For the time being earth is and will continue for quite a long while, to be by far the best place to life for us. Even an earth that was hit by an asteroid is still a much friendlier place to life on then any other known planet reachable by our current technology. If you worry about long term survival of the human race you would do much better building a few self-contained bunker on earth then a habitat on moon or mars, as the later ones have close to zero long term survival chances when supply from earth stops.
The problem they have isn't getting the knob out, but getting it out without introducing additional damage to the window.
Why would you want to chose it every time? Being able to see the password is something you should do for debugging purpose when your password isn't recognized, not as a standard practice.
than they can see your fingers type they characters of your password on the keyboard
Have you ever tried that? Unless you practice it a good bit you are quite unlikely to succeed, you also have to have a good stare at the keyboard which could be easily noticed by the user. Having the password clearly readable on the screen is a whole different matter. People are trained to recognize words quite literally in the blink of an eye. So any non-trivial password is very easy to spot when its written to the screen, even from a distance when you are not actually trying to read it you could spot it just by accident, as you can't stop your brain from recognizing words.
The argument with the keyboard logger really isn't a good one. Sure, obscuring the password won't stop all attacks, but it will stop a lot of attacks and raise the bar for attack much higher, as you have to actually plan the attack and not just look at the screen at the right moment by accident.
That said, an option on the entry-box to de-obscure the password would be welcome, since some are just a chore to type without visual confirmation (long WLAN keys and such).
Agreed, it shouldn't be a global preference, but it should be an option of the input field, i.e. right-click and then select "Show Passwort" or so.
I don't think a zooming interface needs a lot of CPU if done right
You underestimate the problem. The OLPC is quite slow, has very large screen (1200x900) and no hardware acceleration to speak about, so it isn't even fast enough to do fullscreen refreshes at good framerates, let alone draw anything half complex while doing so. So a zooming interface, which does fullscreen refreshes a lot, really isn't exactly the most speedy way to do an interface there.
but it's hardly the best way to select between a small number of other users that you may actually be interacting with on a daily basis.
Sugar has both the global view of everybody, as well as a local view of just your friends.
An clickable set of photos of those users (maybe with online indication shown too), displayed on a single page regardless of their physical location, would be much nicer and more productive to use.
Sure, but it could be easily abused and would add additional complexity.
is cute, but seems more designed for a Movie than for actual use
Why that? It is very simple and easy to understand and most importantly it does something that your normal OS can't even do, as other OSs aren't build with group work in mind.
The biggest problem I have with the Sugar interface is that all that talk about zooming interface sound cool, but only till you realize that the OLPC isn't exactly a powerful machine. The machine is just to slow for fluid full screen animation, so every animation that Sugar does, looks kind of jerky and broken on a real machine and it would be much better to have a fast interface, then one that tries things the hardware just can't do.
that most people who make video games are technicians rather than artists.
I kind of doubt it, think the real problem is simply that most people who makes video games these days are gamers and have been for all their life. Video games these days are way to much driven by other video games, instead of being driven by culture in the broader sense. Which is why you get a tons and tons of games with the same themes and gameplay elements, while hardly anybody ever tries anything outside of established video games conventions. Even the indie crowd doesn't help here, as half there stuff these days is just a 2D physics engine with some minimal art thrown around it.
I would like to see some more games that start out with a topic and then figure out a way to implement it as a game, instead of starting out with a video game genre and then trying to figure out which theme to apply to it.
As it is video games are still lightyears away from books and movies when it comes to the variety of topics they cover. It of course doesn't have to stay that way, but the way the industry works these days I have some doubt about any radical changes anytime soon.
Imagine for a moment that your DVD player didn't have a fast forward button, after all you should watch the movie, not skip through it to the end for instant satisfaction.
Doesn't sound to great, does it? With video games its the same thing. Sure a challenging game is fun, but being forced to play through those challenging parts is not. It should be the users choice of how he wants to enjoy the game and if books and movies are any indication, it works quite fine when the user has instant access to the end of it.
The only real trouble I see with this is that games have progression, you learn skills in earlier levels to use them in later ones. So if you skip those learning parts, because you find them to hard, you mind end up being even more screwed later on, as you haven't learned how to play the game, thus a hard game becomes an impossible one.
But in the end: You payed for the game, so you should have the right to see all of it, if cheats and autoplay allow that, so be it.
The difference between Sonys and Microsofts motion controls is that Sony actually demonstrated useful gameplay. FPS, RTS, sword fighting, tennis, golf, graffiti and many more are rather trivial to implement with Sonys solution as shown by their tech demo. What did Microsoft on the other side show? Splattering color on a wall? Great, but where is the precision in that? Fully-Body-Waggle Breakout, well party fun, sure, but isn't really useful as a general game mechanic. And then Burnout, well, sure it might work, but where is the advantage over using a controller or if I care, a real racing wheel controller? Natal just doesn't seem all to useful outside from a few party games and most of the useful things it could do (face and voice recognition) could be done as well with existing technology, i.e. a normal camera and a headset.