So in a way was/is the DS. It was in fact claimed by Nintendo themselves that the DS was NOT the full sequel to the GBA.
The Wii is NOT a next generation console as we have come to expect. It is decidely underpowered, even compared to last generation.
The lack of a dvd player is trivial, anyone who wants one can get one so cheap nowadays it is pointless to have it as a feature and either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray just wouldn't fit with its low price point.
The simple fact is the the Wii is an attempt to go a different route. Can Nintendo succeed in selling games that despite not being able to compete on graphics terms are considered fun enough to be bought? Or perhaps an even simpler bet, that not enough people will have HD tv screens to notice the higher res graphics of the PS3/360? After all, unless your tv is HD ready you won't see much improvement anyway.
But does anyone else find it ironic that Microsoft who has made billions in the last decade selling point upgrades to their OS is commeting on someone else doing a 1.5? Could windows 98 be considered a full.5 upgrade to 95? How about XP to 2000 and 2000 to NT4 etc etc?
The simple fact is that right now the Wii, no matter how underpowered is the one console still sold out. No I don't see why. I do NOT like its games. Then again, I in general don't like consoles. But for a 1.5 console, Nintendo ain't doing bad. If anything MS and Sony should be really worried because with the cash Nintendo is taking in they could be the ones who in a couple of years could launch a 2.5 console that will truly blow the PS3 and 360 out of the water while these consoles by then will be considered old.
The whole idea is that you write the code for your current project in such a way that you can re-use it for future projects. Intresting idea BUT it is going to add costs to your current project. If that is going to make you go over-budget so you are fired and never get any future projects you just screwed yourselve. Hard.
SWG, Everquest 2 and Vanguard all have amazing engines that most people just don't have the hardware to run. These are the people that got to buy your game KNOW because MMO's just don't come back from a lack-luster launch.
Yes, a game like The Sims and even its sequel do not have engines that can truly compete any more with the latest on offer. Yet many a game company would kill to have its sales figures years after launch.
The sad fact is that EQ2 on a normal pc looks worse then WoW on that same machine, as today Vanguard looks worse on a normal machine then LOTRO. Yeah yeah, two years down the line when today's monster rigs are common place the game can use that power. And? EQ2 minimum hardware specks are now more realistic because of the advancing years. So were is the mass exodus from WoW to this beautifull game?
There isn't.
Yes, I see your point on everquest BUT you can go to far. If 99% of your player base has to run on "low" settings, your engine might just be a bit to future-proof.
I only covered the ones mentioned in the slashdot story.
And no I don't claim any particular insight, but I at least unlike the story writer know that SWG is NOT a contender for the WoW crown.
Oh and I played a couple of the ones you mention and several others like Ragnorak Online in its endless open beta, who hasn't.
And I still think my conclusion stands, SWG tried but ultimately failed to deliver and was killed just when its bugs started to become bearable, WoW succeeded because it was the first to simply do an MMO well and LOTRO is the next one to do just that.
I have the same basis for choosing my character, IF I am going to spend ages looking at it, it better have a nice ass.
Yes I have played Guild Wars and yes it does look nice. If I remember right it even has boob animator for the female hunter. NICE!
Sadly it the basic gameplay just never grew on me. The constant need to juggle your spells/skills around based on the area you were going into just got tiring.
You can't move for the WoW refugees who are sick of the endless raid. But I think it says a lot you name facebook and myspace. Like it or not, WoW is the 12yr olds MMORPG, and that loses its appeal if your not 12 anymore.
The oldest first, Star Wars Galaxies. Yes its launch was bugged, yes bugs took for ever to fix and yes SOE changed the nature of the game, in my opinion ruining it, with the CU and the NGE. Yet it remains one of the most ambitious titles. Player controlled economy with all equipment obtained through crafting NOT looting, yes this could mean that a new player who wasn't socially capable enough to find existing players, had a hard time getting the money to buy the equipment. I personally have helped plenty of newbies to get their decent starter kit. SWG had a nice community. It also remains alone in allowing you to combine classes as you saw fit. Sure, this did lead to some people trying to spec out uber combat classes and to wich SOE made the fatal mistake of them upping the high level content to those specced out players. Yes the doc-buff was the death of grouping BUT it tried.
A typical SWG quest, oh wait, nobody bothered with them because although some had nice writing the XP and loot sucked and so why bother, RPG for the story? Not in MMO land mate.
Everquest 2 too tried. FULL SPEECH! Read that again and realize that in 2007 NOT ONE SINGLE MMORPG EXCEPT EVERQUEST 2 HAS SPOKEN TEXT FOR ITS QUEST GIVERS. 2000 called, they want their text bubbles back. It also tried a new crafting system and upped the stakes in the graphics department. It didn't work. EQ2 is a nice enough game but it is also evercamp squared. A typical EQ2 quest goes like this. Kill 20 X, turn in, Kill 20 X, turn in, Kill 20 X, turn in, Kill 20 X, turn in, Kill rare spawn that only spawn on days with no y.
And then SOE changed the game again, the running animation now looks like an old fashioned slapstick and the death penalty was made so light it barely matters.
Next, there is WoW. A little known MMORPG that is managing to hang on somehow. Blizzard is to MMORPG's what Microsoft is to desktops. It does nothing new, it copied everything it does from everyone else and still it absolutly dominates. Does it have less bugs? No, read the forums, did it have an untroubled launch? Like hell, does it have excellent customer service? Still read the forums.
Its gameplay is a throwback to the orignal everquest with absolutly nothing new added. And yet. Something is right. (something is also wrong, but I am coming to that).
EVERY single SOE game has an engine that is claimed to be future-proof wich is why your computer right now will choke on it. Apparently nobody at SOE realized that a future proof engine is of no use unless the game itself has a future.
The WoW engine is NOT futureproof. Blizzard used an engine that computers of that day could run. Its relativly low power is hidden masterfully by their choice of art direction (hint to SOE, you need some) and it works. To a point. I am not alone in simply NOT like the graphics after prolonged exposure. It is worthy to note that of all the major MMORPG's in the west WoW is closest to the korean ones in the lack of being able to customize your avatars basic looks. Well I say avatar, WoW players tend to think of it as toons.
WoW is Everquest Lite done decently. It says a lot about the MMORPG market that this is high praise indeed. What turns people off sooner or later is that WoW copied everything from everquest including evergrind and evercamp. These things I could have done without.
A typical WoW quest goes like this. Loot item from X by killing it. Oops that one didn't have it, kill another, and another and another and another (repeat for several hours).
Next, another SOE title. Ambitous, certainly, trying new things, absolutly. Bugged, oh hell yes. I am talking offcourse about no other game then Vanguard.
More races then any other game and although a cynic might claim most are just color variations, they do have different starting areas/stories. More classes as well. An extra gameplay option in the form of diplomacy. A future proof engine (hint looks great, won't run) and lots of potential. And bugs. Lots of bugs. Basic stupid bugs that
Counterstrike is NOT that violent. Yeah you can unload a gun pointblank into a "persons" face BUT the effect is cartoonish. They just crumple to the floor with fake and totally unconvcing blood and a fully intact body (unless new damage modelling has been added).
Soldier of Fortune and a game I don't remember had location damage. Shoot someone in the groin and they react to that.
In Mafia death was far from instant. People would fall to the floor and attempt to crawl away begging for their life.
In CS your kills are mainly enemy soldiers. In SoF I believe there were civilians but they were NOT your main target. In Mafia they often were.
So wich game is the more violent? You could play Mafia nicely offcourse but shooting an unarmed innocent women who is begging for her life trying to scramble to safety is a tad different from shooting an enemy soldier carrying a loaded weapon in combat.
You could see SoF just as realism, you don't HAVE to go for the most painfull shots that a sure the most prolonged death struggle.
And that is what I think sets violent gamers apart from gamers who play violent games.
Do violent games make you violent? Offcourse not. Porn does not make you horny, nobody listens to mood music and we don't read a fun novel to perk ourselves up.
With more people voting for their favorite singer in the tv-program Idols then in local elections has democracy and the idea of one-man-one-vote finally jumped the shark?
What a load of nonsense this article is. First off he doesn't get the difference between opensource software/code and open standards and then he mistakes an idea for a product.
Hell, it would even be silly to say tv has jumped the shark. Does he even know what the term means?
Yes you can stream data from the card BUT that is exactly what you do, you stream it. It is NOT part of "main memory". In a way it is pretty similar to reading data on the fly from the HD or CD or offcourse the UMD disc.
The PSP can and does in certain games also keep the UMD running to load data as needed (this offcourse sucks battery power). With GTA on the PSP it is pretty amazing (until you remember the low resolution that the game actually has) how it can once load a level and then play smoothly.
The DS design itself is NOT superior. It is just different. The DS can NEVER play GTA even if it had the horsepower. The DS will forever be limited to its small memory, it can "swap/stream" faster and more random but it can never hold as much at the same time.
On the other hand, the DS can in theory have as much rom as needed (enough to hold even the biggest PC games, for a ds system a truly staggering amount of data) and I believe in theory could even include extra "stuff" on the catridge, from gadgets like the light sensor on a GBA game to perhaps extra cpu power. Its clearest advantage is that saves are on the game media, not the device. It clearest dis-advantage is that saves are limited to the media, not the device. The PSP tends to have superior saving capabilty.
The PSP's greatest failure is that while it has a load of memory it does not have nearly enough. Loading data on the fly CAN be done but it costs power. In this day and age it really should have had more to be truly cutting edge, this especially hurts its non-gaming stuff like the webbrowser. Ever tried browsing on a 32mb PC?
The DS does NOT attempt to be cutting edge, and therefore it gets away with its far more modest memory. The PSP is a low-powered sports car. The DS is a spiffy little town car. The PSP tries and fails, the DS doesn't try and succeeds.
I actually own both, and the PSP plays GTA and I like it and the DS plays advance wars and I like it. So in a way, they both succeed. And fail, because those are the ONLY games I haven't sold off by now and I am unlikely to buy anything else I have seen so far. Then again, nintendo already made a profit on my DS, Sony did not on my PSP. So I guess Nintendo still is still winner.
Point One: I do not like nintendo games. I own a DS but not single nintendo developed game. Worse, all the games listed as being developed by nintendo leave me cold as well. So if other publishers, who make games I do like, can't survive, then I loose out.
Nintendo becoming the biggest player is only good if you like nintendo games.
I think people still expect that the DS and Wii are intermediate consoles, the DS was even claimed NOT to be the next gameboy but a in between. This might have been nintendo trying to safe itself from a potential failure BUT the idea has stuck.
Point Two: IF HD-TV takes off then the Wii might age a lot faster then previous consoles. HD-TV might not take off, especially if people do not buy the Blu-Ray player or the HD-TV addon player. *cough* PS3/360 *cough*
Point Three: See one. Oh and remember, to read carefully. Nintendo overruns the top end sales of charts on NINTENDO platforms. This can also be read thus. Do not publish games for the Wii because they won't sell because Wii buyers only buy the kiddie Nintendo games. Sure, you might claim that this market is big enough, but Nintendo itself seems to think it needs third party titles to reach that audience that its own games cannot.
Blizzad created a huge success with WoW BUT it also can be seen as bad for the industry as all that money is NOT going to other publishers and ultimately this leads to fewer games and less choice.
Does it help if you replace Nintendo/Blizzard with Microsoft and talk about the OS market instead to see the light?
What the game industry does NOT need is a monopoly. Not by MS, not by Sony and certainly not by Nintendo (especially the US half of it).
What is the relation of graphics to gameplay or to more accurate about the Wii vs the PS3/360 vs the PC.
Note that I put the PS3 and the 360 together but add the PC as a seperate contestant. The PS3 and the 360 are roughly of similar capability, in theory the PS3 should have more processing power but that is not yet evident and it in other aspects it is pretty similar, mostly memory.
Ah, yes, memory. The Wii has got a tiny amount of it (88+64+3), the PS360 has 512 (shared between main and video), and the PC, well eh anywhere from 1 gig to 4 gig nowadays PLUS video memory.
Memory is important for two things. Texture sizes and resolution related data in general. Simply put, for higher resolutions you need more memory. The Wii is NOT HD so does not need the same amount of memory as its HD competitors (the PC offcourse is one of those and has been when consoles still thought interlaced was fancy (can you tell I am a PC snob already?).
Does this matter? Not in itself. Bigger textures can have more detail BUT it is extremely rare for this to have a significant effect on gameplay other then immersion. Military sims were you need to be able to tell the difference based on the texture are perhaps the exception. These are NOT the majority of gameplay (WW2 sims spot uniforms that vary far to much to be confused simply because of a low-res texture).
However, more texture memory could also be used for more variation, it is the difference between every character having the same texture and having unique characters. Damage representation with decals (textures overlayed on the regular texture) again consume memory. PC users know this, FPS ofen allow you to set the number of decals the game will remember to safe memory.
Simply put, the Wii worlds are going to be less detailed and less varied.
Even more worrying, the Wii worlds possibly are also going to be smaller. Remember Deus EX 2 and its tiny levels? Jade Empire on the x-box and its LONG loading times? Play Deus EX2 on the PC and check its memory consumption, pitifull. The game had to run on the X-box, and the levels had to fit insides its pitiful memory. Jade Empire on the PC can keep things in memory and the loading time in the arena is less then a second.
Does this matter? well there is worse to come. It doesn't have an HD. Only a tiny flash storage. So data has to be loaded from the optical disc. Less install time, increased loading times but even worse, random access time that stink.
The Wii is going to want to load its data in as linear an order as possible. This will be okay for linear track based racing games that KNOW what scenery/data needs to loaded next, but sucks for GTA type games wich might see you loading any kind of data next.
In short, the Wii will have smaller areas, with less detail and less randomness/variety.
Does this mean lesser gameplay?
Well now it is confession time. My two favorite "consoles", my PC, dual CPU, 4 gig main memory, over 1 gig video memory AND the DS (lite). I like MMO's and I like Advance wars Dual Strike and some other DS games I would NEVER tolerate on a PC.
And have fun playing them both.
The Wii COULD be a DS to me, BUT it could also be a PS360 to me. Note that my PC style games would NEVER run on these crippled machines (even Sony (or especially Sony) cannot get its own MMO's to run with the pitifull memory of the consoles (even the ancient SWG is only happy with 1gig).
You see I am an odd person. Doom was better then Wolfenstein and quake was better then doom. The improvement was part gameplay but the gameplay could only be achieved through the improved hardware. Yes, games like System Shock showed that quake style graphics were possible in the days of doom but that was cutting edge software and ID is still here, looking glass is not. Oh and your SS experience varied greatly on your hardware as it was one of handfull of games back then to support higher resolutions if you had the power.
While I agree with the "kids these days" element I can also see the value in this. The fact is that even decades ago kids hated to run. But we did because if you didn't you got in trouble. Times are different now. Is that bad? Perhaps but if the old people did everything better how come they had two world wars while today's youth can barely get a decent escalated police action going. Come on, iraq, afghanistan? Where is the carpet bombing, the agent orange eh? There ain't even any secret bombing of other countries. Kids today, pah!
DDR is fun, and more or less an individual sport that does not immidiatly require atheletic skills. A fat kid can still be good for it (as long as his condition lasts) and score immidiate results. To perform in a team sport requires long hard effort before you get any reward and you will be the loser all the time.
As for the money involed. DDR can be played in the same classroom that regular lessons are given in. What exactly are the costs of a track field and sports equipment. What is the costs of injuries?
I was of the generation still to be conscripted into the dutch army, part of the training were two tests. Running laps in a certain amount of time and a point to point run and judged on the amount of time. My laps were low, because A I couldn't be arsed (dutch military strategy is/was to be nuked by russians to disable navo forces and then to be nuked by the americans to deny russia access to dutch infrastructure, my running lots of laps did not seem to be a vital element in this strategy. B if I was half way across the field when the time ran out, I would still have to run back, so why not just idle at the finish line and save myself some hassle. The point to point run I did run great because the sooner you finished the sooner it was finished and you had to get to the finish line anyway. Motivation, it motivates you.
If DDR gets kids to excersise then just spend a few bucks that you would otherwise waste on underused equipment and get them to burn some fat. It works, what more justification is needed.
Back when I was their age, we stood up against the bleachers at all dances... AND WE LIKED IT. Kinda. If only BMonger would've talked to me... just once. *cry*
Note to everyone, the opposite or same sex is just as nervous to make the first move. The difference between successfull people and well us, is not that they got the lines, or the looks, or the money or the charima, it is that they moved first. Oh and didn't spend all their time around sexes you are not attracted too. Remember computers are fun but the number of girl/homosexuals around them can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Oh and the few that are, you CAN talk to them you know.
I still thank my mother she made me take dancing lessons. I am ugly, still have zits, am shy and introvert but I could dance. In world of non-dancing male even a geek can have the girls at his beg and call when dancing is involved. It does something to a young man to have women line up for a dance with you.
If you do NOT work out and do NOT watch your diet. Well just google "obesity related diseases", if you can muster the energy that is.
15 years is a long time and it is a safe bet that a lot of people reading this won't make it. Especially those kids in the article. While none of them were at the extreme there were more fatties then there were when I was in school. In my day the fatties were the minority, in this picture they are the majority.
There, did that make sense? When "they" define what is immoral ANYTHING you do can be judged as being immoral. In fact, you nick is immoral. Please hold out your hands so I can chop them off.
What do you mean my post is immoral, I NEED MY HANDS!
For a while the EU NBC (I think) also aired the "Tonight Show with Jay Leno". In the ads it ran an advetising campaign were it showed the benefit of ads sponsered programs by comparing a full colour thick ad filled newspaper with a thin black&white non-ad filled newspaper. Same with a news show. There were others as well.
Now this was an ad, even the most rabid american would agree on that. What I put to you is that this was propangda of the same level as shown in other parts of the world and NO not limited to the soviet union, nazi-germany or the UK (in no particular order of evil).
I am even willing to go further, most ads are not just ads for the product itself. At the most obvious level this is well known. A ford car ad is ALSO an ad for cars in general, an ad for a musical could ALSO get people intrested in going to other shows.
But there is another level, an ad can also be seen as an ad/propagana for the consumer society/capatalism. You got old proganada films from long gone societies that show you all the good things the people can enjoy if only they follow the way of life. Does western tv not show exactly the same, follow this way of life and you too can have a car, a big house, a beautifull husband/wife, dog, cat, kids, no piles etc etc?
Offcourse since the western way of life actually manages to deliver to a lot of people (or at least seem too) people don't see anything wrong with it. While there is a difference between propaganda telling you can have X and you can't and telling you can have X and you can, it doesn't change the nature of the message.
Now ask yourselve this, WHO advertises/tell us that western media are free and uncensored and in the best interest of the people?
Ain't it funny that the big coorperations that own the media happen to tell us that the system that gives them their power is good for us?
It might be, just because their is a huge profit to be made on dental hygiene does NOT mean brushing your teeth ain't good for you, it is just a tiny bit suspect.
In the west there is censorship. State mandated censorship and this includes the US. Restricting access to a person based on anything is censorship. 18+ sites anyone? Banning access to kiddieporn sites?
We are told this is good for us. It might be, but I would still want to know what the motivation is of the people telling us this is bad.
In Iran it is easy to see the motivation, control. In the west it is harder. OR could that just be because we in the west have been brainwashed into this?
A tiny current issue in holland right now is animal sex. Human sex with animals. The act and records of it ain't illegal at the moment unless the animal is hurt. I believe we share this with the parts of the US but for some reason holland is now claimed as the home of animal porn (GO DUTCH!)
There are now proposals to make this illegal.
What is my point? WHY should this be illegal (other then the animal cruelty thing, wich is already illegal, and lets face it, a female horse is NOT going to even notice when a human male fucks her, no not even if you are black)?
Because society tells us it is so, christian culture to be precise. Japanese culture has different routes and there animal porn is also legal. What is intresting to see is the different reaction, while both cultures have a "ewh" reaction, only in the west do you also get a moral reaction. The japanese just find it disgusting but not sinful.
I am generalizing to the extreme here
BUT who is currently telling the dutch people about this news event? The media. Newspapers owned by a handfull of publishers and tv stations often with known backgrounds (wether christian or progressive does not really matter, they have an agenda).
What is 'good' in holland is that for now we are still fairly balanced. For the EO (christian loonies who are extremely left-wing liberals compared to american loonies) there is the VPRO (so liberal it makes the most liberal american seem like a the
This will exclude EVERYONE from the army. In fact you are disqualified. You feel that the "poor" people are less then you, so you would not persom to full potential because you'll feel they are underqualified, inadequate etc etc.
BUT poor people you claim are the majority, but poor people feel rich people like you are pampered snobs. So they wouldn't perform well.
You can't have any combination of race since ALL races think something about ALL other races.
And what about rednecks vs city slickers. West coast vs East coast. Democrats vs Republicans?
By your logic you would have at most an army of one because be honest, deep down we ALL feel everyone else is just a tad inferior to ourselves. Be honest, I do, and you do. The problem is that I am right.:)
There is a portion of slashdot users who believe the war in iraq is about oil. Wether this is true or not is another discussion. The question is, what do you do about it?
I think that a bumper sticker on your SUV with "Impeach Bush" is not entirely convincing.
There is a portion of slashdot users who believe that the Chinese goverment is a dictatorship who opress their peoples (and others like Tiber and less directly Taiwanese) rights. Wether this is true or not is another discussion. The question is, what do you do about it?
If you are posting this on a "Made in China" PC, your anti-chinese post is not entirely convincing.
If Google is supporting the regime by agreeing to do business under its rules then anyone who buys chinese products made under chinese rules is supporting the regime as well. In some ways far more directly, what does Google contribute to the Chinese economy and the power of the goverment compared to the huge chinese export market?
Some would claim that part of the power of the chinese goverment comes less from supressionist measures like censorship and secret police, etc etc, and more from the economic success wich ensures that enough people make enough money not to complain. As long as they are not yet coming for you, what does it matter that all the people that cry out are disappearing. If you join them, who will cry out for you? Certainly not those bastards getting fat under the regime that just executed you.
We kid ourselves when we fall for lines like 'do no evil'. These are NOTHING more then marketting lines meant to make us feel good inside as long as we do not think about them. Enviromentially friendly petrol, green electricity, do no evil. Slogans with no meaning meant to appease what little consience we have left, what litte we can afford to have.
The simple fact is that you cannot NOT buy products from regimes that are morally wrong. If the war in Iraq was for oil then every mile I drive I am the cause for that war, yet I need to drive for my work (taking a van load of tools with me in public transport is NOT allowed, I tried once on a bet).
I "need" a computer and computers are made in china. You can blaim capatalism if you like, but good luck changing that.
This proposal will NOT pass, the board is against it and stockholders hardly ever vote against the board and NEVER on things like this. It wouldn't even have passed if Google had not gone public. The google owners are capatalists and capatalists will NEVER EVER do the right thing if it stands in the way of profit. If they did they would have stopped being capatalists.
This is not a damnation in itself. Where is it written that google has a duty to change China? Does that duty not foremost lie with the chinese people themselves? If they are willing, through action or in-action to live under their current regime, then that is their choice.
Remember ultimately that we ALL live in a dictatorship, a dictatorship of the masses. The masses in the US of A have voted for a system of money over principles and freedom of speech (to a degree) over protection, the masses in the EU have voted for a more social system and a restriction of speech for an exchange of protection. The Chinese people to have voted, not in an election but by their daily action of NOT overthrowing the goverment, that they approve (or at least do not disaprove enough to actually do anything about it) of the current situation.
Because let us not forget that dictatorships no matter how powerfull and seemingly in control CAN be overthown.
Like say americans who are REALLY against the war in Iraq could overthow the goverment. Afterall they claim to be in the majority, so get those guns and start fighting. Surely the majority would win? Or are you afraid that when you storm the white house and you happen to look behind you you will happen to find that you are in fact a majority of one in a military extremele significant way?
Oh and googles "do no evil" slogan, well, that should have been a sign should it. You don't need a slogan to do something that comes naturally. You do NOT see racing stripes on a ferrari.
It was the first "console" game I liked, and that says a lot (Look up PC snob and you will find my name) BUT lets not kid ourselves, Lara being Lara helped a LOT. Oh and it ain't just the tits, a nicely done A-cup model would have sold just as well if she had oozed sex like Lara did. Or maybe I am underestimating the claimed americans obsession with big tits.
But Singles is a pure sex game, as I said it is a "The Sims" light with extra bugs, less variety and sex. It is CLEARLY inferior to the The Sims in every respect (especially sing the sims has sex as well) and yet it sells well, enough for a sequel even.
As for mods being a minority. Well, perhaps I just visit the wrong forums. Granted the official game forums usually ban such talk BUT if you visit the secondary forums that exist around games you will find them mentioned often enough.
But people buy games to have fun, for me, looking at a sexy female is fun. So is doing a fun game but doing fun games with a sexy female is even more fun (no not those kinda games, this is slashdot afterall).
Holland is known to be tolerant of gays, Amsterdam especially. Yet the word "homo" is a curse word and not a light one either. In english where you call someone a bastard, even a fucking one, in dutch the person is called gay, same for a stupid idiot or a mean person. Gay each and everyone of them.
A transvestite was recently beaten to death and two male newspapers reporters who pretended to be a gay couple found out just how gay people are viewed, especially by that other hated group, muslim immigrants.
And yet, I could take you on a tour and you would see none of this.
Not that it matters. The people of Iran do NOT matter, the goverment that rules them and that they support (through action or inaction does not matter) is what counts on the world stage.
Many americans claim to be against the iraq war, in fact some sources claim the majority. So how exactly was Bush RE-ELECTED, how the fuck did he get elected in the first place and why are there no efforts to stop the war or at least hamper it?
I would have find the article you linked to a great deal more convincing if the reporter had dressed up as a jew. Or if he had been a she and refused to wear a headscarf, notice how ALL the women in the photos wear one?
White male known to be a reporter from britain is shown a positive face of Iran. Wow, yeah, amazing.
Life isn't a bioware RPG you know. There is no physical representation of the "good" or "evil" of a people. I am reasonably postive that death camp guards on their day off do NOT sprout horns and lurk in dungoens and beat foreign reporters to death for fun.
In fact isn't it amazing racist or at least culterists to claim that "Iran's youth wants western fashion therefore they are not our enemy"? Some of the bloodiests wars in histories have between countries that outsiders could not tell apart.
Well, that is one way to deal with iran nuke crisis, wait until they kill themselves off. It will be a race between the west and the east. Who will kill themselves off fastest, the west by not fucking enough or the east by chopping off their own heads.
Ah, the human race, and people wonder why we aren't visited by aliens. THEY AIN'T THAT STUPID!
It just had to happen, you put the interview rooms on the first floor and no elevator and BAM, there go your hopes of any >30 making it to the interview. If only they had made it uphill both ways through a snow storm. That would have been a cakewalk.
When you buy AIX you don't just buy an OS, you buy the hardware as well. As Apple fanboys know, it is MUCH easier to get stable software if you know exactly what kind of hardware you are going to run on.
YES it is possible to run linux on this hardware too, this is IBM after all, BUT even then you are running an OS that is designed to run on much more. AIX isn't.
Isn't linux on PC hardware stable? Nope.
And yes, I do run linux on my desktop and it is pretty damn stable, BUT I have had crashes and freezes over the last couple of years. Even one on a light server that only runs apache.
No, nothing like the famed windows crashes and forced reboots every single day BUT if you run a major company and a computer hiccups once every 3 years that still can mean a significant amount of downtime over all your machines combined.
Saying AIX is more stable then Linux is roughly like claiming a diesel truck is more reliable then a pretrol powered van. It is not really a slam against van's, just that trucks are in a different class entirely.
Oh I get it, Lara Crofts bossom was there as a counter balance to enable her to do all those nifty headstands.
The same sex and trio romance options in Jade Empire are welcomed because gamers are passionate about equal right for all people, not because they want to see two girls snog.
Every MMORPG out there has a female avatar out there wearing armour that could not be called a thong because thongs cover more flesh.
But sex don't sell in games. Right. Sure, whatever.
That is why nude patches for games are rare.
Come on, sex sells EVERYTHING.
Ah, but maybe you are talking the sex act itself. Granted, that is an often unexplored area, in games at the old US of A, the puritan nation.
BUT sex is absent in lots of other US aimed entertainment as well. Their have been several childeren programs on the european continent with full frontal nudity, how many US programs?
Since the US is a very large market naturally most game publishers tend to cater to that market. This is not unusual at all, ever notice how every alien invasion, every disaster happens in the US?
European games on occasion are less restricted and the japanese have an entire industry of sex games.
The problem is indeed that if you got a great game, the sex just isn't that important, and if you don't, well then it just ain't a good game so why bother?
I remember a dutch movie that had full penetration shown plainly on camera (some movie about kidnappers in a military training ground, at one point a soldier driving by in a jeep is shot), even as a horny teen I could see the movie stank.
Because SEX also does NOT sell.
The promise of sex sells. In Jade Empire, and many games with romance options, the camera discreetly fades out to black when the characters hit the sheets. Would you like the game to continue? TO show the huffing and puffing? Movies don't.
So you got three things:
Sexiness, the promise of sex. Females with full figures and clothes one size to small. This sells, and is what you see all around you in the media. It ain't full on hardcore sex and I personally thing that it has the following deep and major effect on our society namely.... ooh boobies on tv!
Romance/the prelude to sex. This is indeed rare BUT does happen all the time in adventures and RPG style games. For that matter many a game with a strong story element. Yeah counterstrike and such do not have it. Then again you can go through the same level over and over but the same romance dialog? But what would Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis be without the banter the love interest?
Hardcore full on sex. Check out the european game "the singles" and the japanese games. The singles is a "The sims" with an added "need" and it is BORING. You think getting you cooking skill up is boring, try getting the love interest high enough by cuddling over and over again just so you can go to next level all the time taking care of all the other needs.
Japanese games have interactive books, some have good story, some do not, the good ones do not need the sex, and who is desperate enough to play through a bad story for some porn? THe sex simulators again are a case of what the fuck. It is roughly the same reason you do not have a huge success with a cooking simulator. Cooking is fun but so is eating it, so who would bother doing just the cooking and not the eating? Stupid people called cooks and women.
Sex sells, but only the promise of it.
I can play an MMO for hours on end but could I masturbate for that long? I am NOT 14 any more.
Slashdot Mirror
So in a way was/is the DS. It was in fact claimed by Nintendo themselves that the DS was NOT the full sequel to the GBA.
The Wii is NOT a next generation console as we have come to expect. It is decidely underpowered, even compared to last generation.
The lack of a dvd player is trivial, anyone who wants one can get one so cheap nowadays it is pointless to have it as a feature and either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray just wouldn't fit with its low price point.
The simple fact is the the Wii is an attempt to go a different route. Can Nintendo succeed in selling games that despite not being able to compete on graphics terms are considered fun enough to be bought? Or perhaps an even simpler bet, that not enough people will have HD tv screens to notice the higher res graphics of the PS3/360? After all, unless your tv is HD ready you won't see much improvement anyway.
But does anyone else find it ironic that Microsoft who has made billions in the last decade selling point upgrades to their OS is commeting on someone else doing a 1.5? Could windows 98 be considered a full .5 upgrade to 95? How about XP to 2000 and 2000 to NT4 etc etc?
The simple fact is that right now the Wii, no matter how underpowered is the one console still sold out. No I don't see why. I do NOT like its games. Then again, I in general don't like consoles. But for a 1.5 console, Nintendo ain't doing bad. If anything MS and Sony should be really worried because with the cash Nintendo is taking in they could be the ones who in a couple of years could launch a 2.5 console that will truly blow the PS3 and 360 out of the water while these consoles by then will be considered old.
The whole idea is that you write the code for your current project in such a way that you can re-use it for future projects. Intresting idea BUT it is going to add costs to your current project. If that is going to make you go over-budget so you are fired and never get any future projects you just screwed yourselve. Hard.
SWG, Everquest 2 and Vanguard all have amazing engines that most people just don't have the hardware to run. These are the people that got to buy your game KNOW because MMO's just don't come back from a lack-luster launch.
Yes, a game like The Sims and even its sequel do not have engines that can truly compete any more with the latest on offer. Yet many a game company would kill to have its sales figures years after launch.
The sad fact is that EQ2 on a normal pc looks worse then WoW on that same machine, as today Vanguard looks worse on a normal machine then LOTRO. Yeah yeah, two years down the line when today's monster rigs are common place the game can use that power. And? EQ2 minimum hardware specks are now more realistic because of the advancing years. So were is the mass exodus from WoW to this beautifull game?
There isn't.
Yes, I see your point on everquest BUT you can go to far. If 99% of your player base has to run on "low" settings, your engine might just be a bit to future-proof.
I only covered the ones mentioned in the slashdot story.
And no I don't claim any particular insight, but I at least unlike the story writer know that SWG is NOT a contender for the WoW crown.
Oh and I played a couple of the ones you mention and several others like Ragnorak Online in its endless open beta, who hasn't.
And I still think my conclusion stands, SWG tried but ultimately failed to deliver and was killed just when its bugs started to become bearable, WoW succeeded because it was the first to simply do an MMO well and LOTRO is the next one to do just that.
I have the same basis for choosing my character, IF I am going to spend ages looking at it, it better have a nice ass.
Yes I have played Guild Wars and yes it does look nice. If I remember right it even has boob animator for the female hunter. NICE!
Sadly it the basic gameplay just never grew on me. The constant need to juggle your spells/skills around based on the area you were going into just got tiring.
You can't move for the WoW refugees who are sick of the endless raid. But I think it says a lot you name facebook and myspace. Like it or not, WoW is the 12yr olds MMORPG, and that loses its appeal if your not 12 anymore.
The oldest first, Star Wars Galaxies. Yes its launch was bugged, yes bugs took for ever to fix and yes SOE changed the nature of the game, in my opinion ruining it, with the CU and the NGE. Yet it remains one of the most ambitious titles. Player controlled economy with all equipment obtained through crafting NOT looting, yes this could mean that a new player who wasn't socially capable enough to find existing players, had a hard time getting the money to buy the equipment. I personally have helped plenty of newbies to get their decent starter kit. SWG had a nice community. It also remains alone in allowing you to combine classes as you saw fit. Sure, this did lead to some people trying to spec out uber combat classes and to wich SOE made the fatal mistake of them upping the high level content to those specced out players. Yes the doc-buff was the death of grouping BUT it tried.
A typical SWG quest, oh wait, nobody bothered with them because although some had nice writing the XP and loot sucked and so why bother, RPG for the story? Not in MMO land mate.
Everquest 2 too tried. FULL SPEECH! Read that again and realize that in 2007 NOT ONE SINGLE MMORPG EXCEPT EVERQUEST 2 HAS SPOKEN TEXT FOR ITS QUEST GIVERS. 2000 called, they want their text bubbles back. It also tried a new crafting system and upped the stakes in the graphics department. It didn't work. EQ2 is a nice enough game but it is also evercamp squared. A typical EQ2 quest goes like this. Kill 20 X, turn in, Kill 20 X, turn in, Kill 20 X, turn in, Kill 20 X, turn in, Kill rare spawn that only spawn on days with no y.
And then SOE changed the game again, the running animation now looks like an old fashioned slapstick and the death penalty was made so light it barely matters.
Next, there is WoW. A little known MMORPG that is managing to hang on somehow. Blizzard is to MMORPG's what Microsoft is to desktops. It does nothing new, it copied everything it does from everyone else and still it absolutly dominates. Does it have less bugs? No, read the forums, did it have an untroubled launch? Like hell, does it have excellent customer service? Still read the forums.
Its gameplay is a throwback to the orignal everquest with absolutly nothing new added. And yet. Something is right. (something is also wrong, but I am coming to that).
EVERY single SOE game has an engine that is claimed to be future-proof wich is why your computer right now will choke on it. Apparently nobody at SOE realized that a future proof engine is of no use unless the game itself has a future.
The WoW engine is NOT futureproof. Blizzard used an engine that computers of that day could run. Its relativly low power is hidden masterfully by their choice of art direction (hint to SOE, you need some) and it works. To a point. I am not alone in simply NOT like the graphics after prolonged exposure. It is worthy to note that of all the major MMORPG's in the west WoW is closest to the korean ones in the lack of being able to customize your avatars basic looks. Well I say avatar, WoW players tend to think of it as toons.
WoW is Everquest Lite done decently. It says a lot about the MMORPG market that this is high praise indeed. What turns people off sooner or later is that WoW copied everything from everquest including evergrind and evercamp. These things I could have done without.
A typical WoW quest goes like this. Loot item from X by killing it. Oops that one didn't have it, kill another, and another and another and another (repeat for several hours).
Next, another SOE title. Ambitous, certainly, trying new things, absolutly. Bugged, oh hell yes. I am talking offcourse about no other game then Vanguard.
More races then any other game and although a cynic might claim most are just color variations, they do have different starting areas/stories. More classes as well. An extra gameplay option in the form of diplomacy. A future proof engine (hint looks great, won't run) and lots of potential. And bugs. Lots of bugs. Basic stupid bugs that
Counterstrike is NOT that violent. Yeah you can unload a gun pointblank into a "persons" face BUT the effect is cartoonish. They just crumple to the floor with fake and totally unconvcing blood and a fully intact body (unless new damage modelling has been added).
Soldier of Fortune and a game I don't remember had location damage. Shoot someone in the groin and they react to that.
In Mafia death was far from instant. People would fall to the floor and attempt to crawl away begging for their life.
In CS your kills are mainly enemy soldiers. In SoF I believe there were civilians but they were NOT your main target. In Mafia they often were.
So wich game is the more violent? You could play Mafia nicely offcourse but shooting an unarmed innocent women who is begging for her life trying to scramble to safety is a tad different from shooting an enemy soldier carrying a loaded weapon in combat.
You could see SoF just as realism, you don't HAVE to go for the most painfull shots that a sure the most prolonged death struggle.
And that is what I think sets violent gamers apart from gamers who play violent games.
Do violent games make you violent? Offcourse not. Porn does not make you horny, nobody listens to mood music and we don't read a fun novel to perk ourselves up.
SCO just got its teenage daughter pregnant. There corrected it for you.
With more people voting for their favorite singer in the tv-program Idols then in local elections has democracy and the idea of one-man-one-vote finally jumped the shark?
What a load of nonsense this article is. First off he doesn't get the difference between opensource software/code and open standards and then he mistakes an idea for a product.
Hell, it would even be silly to say tv has jumped the shark. Does he even know what the term means?
Yes you can stream data from the card BUT that is exactly what you do, you stream it. It is NOT part of "main memory". In a way it is pretty similar to reading data on the fly from the HD or CD or offcourse the UMD disc.
The PSP can and does in certain games also keep the UMD running to load data as needed (this offcourse sucks battery power). With GTA on the PSP it is pretty amazing (until you remember the low resolution that the game actually has) how it can once load a level and then play smoothly.
The DS design itself is NOT superior. It is just different. The DS can NEVER play GTA even if it had the horsepower. The DS will forever be limited to its small memory, it can "swap/stream" faster and more random but it can never hold as much at the same time.
On the other hand, the DS can in theory have as much rom as needed (enough to hold even the biggest PC games, for a ds system a truly staggering amount of data) and I believe in theory could even include extra "stuff" on the catridge, from gadgets like the light sensor on a GBA game to perhaps extra cpu power. Its clearest advantage is that saves are on the game media, not the device. It clearest dis-advantage is that saves are limited to the media, not the device. The PSP tends to have superior saving capabilty.
The PSP's greatest failure is that while it has a load of memory it does not have nearly enough. Loading data on the fly CAN be done but it costs power. In this day and age it really should have had more to be truly cutting edge, this especially hurts its non-gaming stuff like the webbrowser. Ever tried browsing on a 32mb PC?
The DS does NOT attempt to be cutting edge, and therefore it gets away with its far more modest memory. The PSP is a low-powered sports car. The DS is a spiffy little town car. The PSP tries and fails, the DS doesn't try and succeeds.
I actually own both, and the PSP plays GTA and I like it and the DS plays advance wars and I like it. So in a way, they both succeed. And fail, because those are the ONLY games I haven't sold off by now and I am unlikely to buy anything else I have seen so far. Then again, nintendo already made a profit on my DS, Sony did not on my PSP. So I guess Nintendo still is still winner.
Point One: I do not like nintendo games. I own a DS but not single nintendo developed game. Worse, all the games listed as being developed by nintendo leave me cold as well. So if other publishers, who make games I do like, can't survive, then I loose out.
Nintendo becoming the biggest player is only good if you like nintendo games.
I think people still expect that the DS and Wii are intermediate consoles, the DS was even claimed NOT to be the next gameboy but a in between. This might have been nintendo trying to safe itself from a potential failure BUT the idea has stuck.
Point Two: IF HD-TV takes off then the Wii might age a lot faster then previous consoles. HD-TV might not take off, especially if people do not buy the Blu-Ray player or the HD-TV addon player. *cough* PS3/360 *cough*
Point Three: See one. Oh and remember, to read carefully. Nintendo overruns the top end sales of charts on NINTENDO platforms. This can also be read thus. Do not publish games for the Wii because they won't sell because Wii buyers only buy the kiddie Nintendo games. Sure, you might claim that this market is big enough, but Nintendo itself seems to think it needs third party titles to reach that audience that its own games cannot.
Blizzad created a huge success with WoW BUT it also can be seen as bad for the industry as all that money is NOT going to other publishers and ultimately this leads to fewer games and less choice.
Does it help if you replace Nintendo/Blizzard with Microsoft and talk about the OS market instead to see the light?
What the game industry does NOT need is a monopoly. Not by MS, not by Sony and certainly not by Nintendo (especially the US half of it).
What is the relation of graphics to gameplay or to more accurate about the Wii vs the PS3/360 vs the PC.
Note that I put the PS3 and the 360 together but add the PC as a seperate contestant. The PS3 and the 360 are roughly of similar capability, in theory the PS3 should have more processing power but that is not yet evident and it in other aspects it is pretty similar, mostly memory.
Ah, yes, memory. The Wii has got a tiny amount of it (88+64+3), the PS360 has 512 (shared between main and video), and the PC, well eh anywhere from 1 gig to 4 gig nowadays PLUS video memory.
Memory is important for two things. Texture sizes and resolution related data in general. Simply put, for higher resolutions you need more memory. The Wii is NOT HD so does not need the same amount of memory as its HD competitors (the PC offcourse is one of those and has been when consoles still thought interlaced was fancy (can you tell I am a PC snob already?).
Does this matter? Not in itself. Bigger textures can have more detail BUT it is extremely rare for this to have a significant effect on gameplay other then immersion. Military sims were you need to be able to tell the difference based on the texture are perhaps the exception. These are NOT the majority of gameplay (WW2 sims spot uniforms that vary far to much to be confused simply because of a low-res texture).
However, more texture memory could also be used for more variation, it is the difference between every character having the same texture and having unique characters. Damage representation with decals (textures overlayed on the regular texture) again consume memory. PC users know this, FPS ofen allow you to set the number of decals the game will remember to safe memory.
Simply put, the Wii worlds are going to be less detailed and less varied.
Even more worrying, the Wii worlds possibly are also going to be smaller. Remember Deus EX 2 and its tiny levels? Jade Empire on the x-box and its LONG loading times? Play Deus EX2 on the PC and check its memory consumption, pitifull. The game had to run on the X-box, and the levels had to fit insides its pitiful memory. Jade Empire on the PC can keep things in memory and the loading time in the arena is less then a second.
Does this matter? well there is worse to come. It doesn't have an HD. Only a tiny flash storage. So data has to be loaded from the optical disc. Less install time, increased loading times but even worse, random access time that stink.
The Wii is going to want to load its data in as linear an order as possible. This will be okay for linear track based racing games that KNOW what scenery/data needs to loaded next, but sucks for GTA type games wich might see you loading any kind of data next.
In short, the Wii will have smaller areas, with less detail and less randomness/variety.
Does this mean lesser gameplay?
Well now it is confession time. My two favorite "consoles", my PC, dual CPU, 4 gig main memory, over 1 gig video memory AND the DS (lite). I like MMO's and I like Advance wars Dual Strike and some other DS games I would NEVER tolerate on a PC.
And have fun playing them both.
The Wii COULD be a DS to me, BUT it could also be a PS360 to me. Note that my PC style games would NEVER run on these crippled machines (even Sony (or especially Sony) cannot get its own MMO's to run with the pitifull memory of the consoles (even the ancient SWG is only happy with 1gig).
You see I am an odd person. Doom was better then Wolfenstein and quake was better then doom. The improvement was part gameplay but the gameplay could only be achieved through the improved hardware. Yes, games like System Shock showed that quake style graphics were possible in the days of doom but that was cutting edge software and ID is still here, looking glass is not. Oh and your SS experience varied greatly on your hardware as it was one of handfull of games back then to support higher resolutions if you had the power.
I am an odd person because I do NOT
While I agree with the "kids these days" element I can also see the value in this. The fact is that even decades ago kids hated to run. But we did because if you didn't you got in trouble. Times are different now. Is that bad? Perhaps but if the old people did everything better how come they had two world wars while today's youth can barely get a decent escalated police action going. Come on, iraq, afghanistan? Where is the carpet bombing, the agent orange eh? There ain't even any secret bombing of other countries. Kids today, pah!
DDR is fun, and more or less an individual sport that does not immidiatly require atheletic skills. A fat kid can still be good for it (as long as his condition lasts) and score immidiate results. To perform in a team sport requires long hard effort before you get any reward and you will be the loser all the time.
As for the money involed. DDR can be played in the same classroom that regular lessons are given in. What exactly are the costs of a track field and sports equipment. What is the costs of injuries?
I was of the generation still to be conscripted into the dutch army, part of the training were two tests. Running laps in a certain amount of time and a point to point run and judged on the amount of time. My laps were low, because A I couldn't be arsed (dutch military strategy is/was to be nuked by russians to disable navo forces and then to be nuked by the americans to deny russia access to dutch infrastructure, my running lots of laps did not seem to be a vital element in this strategy. B if I was half way across the field when the time ran out, I would still have to run back, so why not just idle at the finish line and save myself some hassle. The point to point run I did run great because the sooner you finished the sooner it was finished and you had to get to the finish line anyway. Motivation, it motivates you.
If DDR gets kids to excersise then just spend a few bucks that you would otherwise waste on underused equipment and get them to burn some fat. It works, what more justification is needed.
Back when I was their age, we stood up against the bleachers at all dances... AND WE LIKED IT. Kinda. If only BMonger would've talked to me... just once. *cry*
Note to everyone, the opposite or same sex is just as nervous to make the first move. The difference between successfull people and well us, is not that they got the lines, or the looks, or the money or the charima, it is that they moved first. Oh and didn't spend all their time around sexes you are not attracted too. Remember computers are fun but the number of girl/homosexuals around them can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Oh and the few that are, you CAN talk to them you know.
I still thank my mother she made me take dancing lessons. I am ugly, still have zits, am shy and introvert but I could dance. In world of non-dancing male even a geek can have the girls at his beg and call when dancing is involved. It does something to a young man to have women line up for a dance with you.
If you do NOT work out and do NOT watch your diet. Well just google "obesity related diseases", if you can muster the energy that is.
15 years is a long time and it is a safe bet that a lot of people reading this won't make it. Especially those kids in the article. While none of them were at the extreme there were more fatties then there were when I was in school. In my day the fatties were the minority, in this picture they are the majority.
DDR won't safe them.
There, did that make sense? When "they" define what is immoral ANYTHING you do can be judged as being immoral. In fact, you nick is immoral. Please hold out your hands so I can chop them off.
What do you mean my post is immoral, I NEED MY HANDS!
For a while the EU NBC (I think) also aired the "Tonight Show with Jay Leno". In the ads it ran an advetising campaign were it showed the benefit of ads sponsered programs by comparing a full colour thick ad filled newspaper with a thin black&white non-ad filled newspaper. Same with a news show. There were others as well.
Now this was an ad, even the most rabid american would agree on that. What I put to you is that this was propangda of the same level as shown in other parts of the world and NO not limited to the soviet union, nazi-germany or the UK (in no particular order of evil).
I am even willing to go further, most ads are not just ads for the product itself. At the most obvious level this is well known. A ford car ad is ALSO an ad for cars in general, an ad for a musical could ALSO get people intrested in going to other shows.
But there is another level, an ad can also be seen as an ad/propagana for the consumer society/capatalism. You got old proganada films from long gone societies that show you all the good things the people can enjoy if only they follow the way of life. Does western tv not show exactly the same, follow this way of life and you too can have a car, a big house, a beautifull husband/wife, dog, cat, kids, no piles etc etc?
Offcourse since the western way of life actually manages to deliver to a lot of people (or at least seem too) people don't see anything wrong with it. While there is a difference between propaganda telling you can have X and you can't and telling you can have X and you can, it doesn't change the nature of the message.
Now ask yourselve this, WHO advertises/tell us that western media are free and uncensored and in the best interest of the people?
Ain't it funny that the big coorperations that own the media happen to tell us that the system that gives them their power is good for us?
It might be, just because their is a huge profit to be made on dental hygiene does NOT mean brushing your teeth ain't good for you, it is just a tiny bit suspect.
In the west there is censorship. State mandated censorship and this includes the US. Restricting access to a person based on anything is censorship. 18+ sites anyone? Banning access to kiddieporn sites?
We are told this is good for us. It might be, but I would still want to know what the motivation is of the people telling us this is bad.
In Iran it is easy to see the motivation, control. In the west it is harder. OR could that just be because we in the west have been brainwashed into this?
A tiny current issue in holland right now is animal sex. Human sex with animals. The act and records of it ain't illegal at the moment unless the animal is hurt. I believe we share this with the parts of the US but for some reason holland is now claimed as the home of animal porn (GO DUTCH!)
There are now proposals to make this illegal.
What is my point? WHY should this be illegal (other then the animal cruelty thing, wich is already illegal, and lets face it, a female horse is NOT going to even notice when a human male fucks her, no not even if you are black)?
Because society tells us it is so, christian culture to be precise. Japanese culture has different routes and there animal porn is also legal. What is intresting to see is the different reaction, while both cultures have a "ewh" reaction, only in the west do you also get a moral reaction. The japanese just find it disgusting but not sinful.
I am generalizing to the extreme here
BUT who is currently telling the dutch people about this news event? The media. Newspapers owned by a handfull of publishers and tv stations often with known backgrounds (wether christian or progressive does not really matter, they have an agenda).
What is 'good' in holland is that for now we are still fairly balanced. For the EO (christian loonies who are extremely left-wing liberals compared to american loonies) there is the VPRO (so liberal it makes the most liberal american seem like a the
This will exclude EVERYONE from the army. In fact you are disqualified. You feel that the "poor" people are less then you, so you would not persom to full potential because you'll feel they are underqualified, inadequate etc etc.
BUT poor people you claim are the majority, but poor people feel rich people like you are pampered snobs. So they wouldn't perform well.
You can't have any combination of race since ALL races think something about ALL other races.
And what about rednecks vs city slickers. West coast vs East coast. Democrats vs Republicans?
By your logic you would have at most an army of one because be honest, deep down we ALL feel everyone else is just a tad inferior to ourselves. Be honest, I do, and you do. The problem is that I am right. :)
There is a portion of slashdot users who believe the war in iraq is about oil. Wether this is true or not is another discussion. The question is, what do you do about it?
I think that a bumper sticker on your SUV with "Impeach Bush" is not entirely convincing.
There is a portion of slashdot users who believe that the Chinese goverment is a dictatorship who opress their peoples (and others like Tiber and less directly Taiwanese) rights. Wether this is true or not is another discussion. The question is, what do you do about it?
If you are posting this on a "Made in China" PC, your anti-chinese post is not entirely convincing.
If Google is supporting the regime by agreeing to do business under its rules then anyone who buys chinese products made under chinese rules is supporting the regime as well. In some ways far more directly, what does Google contribute to the Chinese economy and the power of the goverment compared to the huge chinese export market?
Some would claim that part of the power of the chinese goverment comes less from supressionist measures like censorship and secret police, etc etc, and more from the economic success wich ensures that enough people make enough money not to complain. As long as they are not yet coming for you, what does it matter that all the people that cry out are disappearing. If you join them, who will cry out for you? Certainly not those bastards getting fat under the regime that just executed you.
We kid ourselves when we fall for lines like 'do no evil'. These are NOTHING more then marketting lines meant to make us feel good inside as long as we do not think about them. Enviromentially friendly petrol, green electricity, do no evil. Slogans with no meaning meant to appease what little consience we have left, what litte we can afford to have.
The simple fact is that you cannot NOT buy products from regimes that are morally wrong. If the war in Iraq was for oil then every mile I drive I am the cause for that war, yet I need to drive for my work (taking a van load of tools with me in public transport is NOT allowed, I tried once on a bet).
I "need" a computer and computers are made in china. You can blaim capatalism if you like, but good luck changing that.
This proposal will NOT pass, the board is against it and stockholders hardly ever vote against the board and NEVER on things like this. It wouldn't even have passed if Google had not gone public. The google owners are capatalists and capatalists will NEVER EVER do the right thing if it stands in the way of profit. If they did they would have stopped being capatalists.
This is not a damnation in itself. Where is it written that google has a duty to change China? Does that duty not foremost lie with the chinese people themselves? If they are willing, through action or in-action to live under their current regime, then that is their choice.
Remember ultimately that we ALL live in a dictatorship, a dictatorship of the masses. The masses in the US of A have voted for a system of money over principles and freedom of speech (to a degree) over protection, the masses in the EU have voted for a more social system and a restriction of speech for an exchange of protection. The Chinese people to have voted, not in an election but by their daily action of NOT overthrowing the goverment, that they approve (or at least do not disaprove enough to actually do anything about it) of the current situation.
Because let us not forget that dictatorships no matter how powerfull and seemingly in control CAN be overthown.
Like say americans who are REALLY against the war in Iraq could overthow the goverment. Afterall they claim to be in the majority, so get those guns and start fighting. Surely the majority would win? Or are you afraid that when you storm the white house and you happen to look behind you you will happen to find that you are in fact a majority of one in a military extremele significant way?
Oh and googles "do no evil" slogan, well, that should have been a sign should it. You don't need a slogan to do something that comes naturally. You do NOT see racing stripes on a ferrari.
It was the first "console" game I liked, and that says a lot (Look up PC snob and you will find my name) BUT lets not kid ourselves, Lara being Lara helped a LOT. Oh and it ain't just the tits, a nicely done A-cup model would have sold just as well if she had oozed sex like Lara did. Or maybe I am underestimating the claimed americans obsession with big tits.
But Singles is a pure sex game, as I said it is a "The Sims" light with extra bugs, less variety and sex. It is CLEARLY inferior to the The Sims in every respect (especially sing the sims has sex as well) and yet it sells well, enough for a sequel even.
As for mods being a minority. Well, perhaps I just visit the wrong forums. Granted the official game forums usually ban such talk BUT if you visit the secondary forums that exist around games you will find them mentioned often enough.
But people buy games to have fun, for me, looking at a sexy female is fun. So is doing a fun game but doing fun games with a sexy female is even more fun (no not those kinda games, this is slashdot afterall).
Holland is known to be tolerant of gays, Amsterdam especially. Yet the word "homo" is a curse word and not a light one either. In english where you call someone a bastard, even a fucking one, in dutch the person is called gay, same for a stupid idiot or a mean person. Gay each and everyone of them.
A transvestite was recently beaten to death and two male newspapers reporters who pretended to be a gay couple found out just how gay people are viewed, especially by that other hated group, muslim immigrants.
And yet, I could take you on a tour and you would see none of this.
Not that it matters. The people of Iran do NOT matter, the goverment that rules them and that they support (through action or inaction does not matter) is what counts on the world stage.
Many americans claim to be against the iraq war, in fact some sources claim the majority. So how exactly was Bush RE-ELECTED, how the fuck did he get elected in the first place and why are there no efforts to stop the war or at least hamper it?
I would have find the article you linked to a great deal more convincing if the reporter had dressed up as a jew. Or if he had been a she and refused to wear a headscarf, notice how ALL the women in the photos wear one?
White male known to be a reporter from britain is shown a positive face of Iran. Wow, yeah, amazing.
Life isn't a bioware RPG you know. There is no physical representation of the "good" or "evil" of a people. I am reasonably postive that death camp guards on their day off do NOT sprout horns and lurk in dungoens and beat foreign reporters to death for fun.
In fact isn't it amazing racist or at least culterists to claim that "Iran's youth wants western fashion therefore they are not our enemy"? Some of the bloodiests wars in histories have between countries that outsiders could not tell apart.
Well, that is one way to deal with iran nuke crisis, wait until they kill themselves off. It will be a race between the west and the east. Who will kill themselves off fastest, the west by not fucking enough or the east by chopping off their own heads.
Ah, the human race, and people wonder why we aren't visited by aliens. THEY AIN'T THAT STUPID!
It just had to happen, you put the interview rooms on the first floor and no elevator and BAM, there go your hopes of any >30 making it to the interview. If only they had made it uphill both ways through a snow storm. That would have been a cakewalk.
When you buy AIX you don't just buy an OS, you buy the hardware as well. As Apple fanboys know, it is MUCH easier to get stable software if you know exactly what kind of hardware you are going to run on.
YES it is possible to run linux on this hardware too, this is IBM after all, BUT even then you are running an OS that is designed to run on much more. AIX isn't.
Isn't linux on PC hardware stable? Nope.
And yes, I do run linux on my desktop and it is pretty damn stable, BUT I have had crashes and freezes over the last couple of years. Even one on a light server that only runs apache.
No, nothing like the famed windows crashes and forced reboots every single day BUT if you run a major company and a computer hiccups once every 3 years that still can mean a significant amount of downtime over all your machines combined.
Saying AIX is more stable then Linux is roughly like claiming a diesel truck is more reliable then a pretrol powered van. It is not really a slam against van's, just that trucks are in a different class entirely.
WERE HAVE YOU BEEN?
Oh I get it, Lara Crofts bossom was there as a counter balance to enable her to do all those nifty headstands.
The same sex and trio romance options in Jade Empire are welcomed because gamers are passionate about equal right for all people, not because they want to see two girls snog.
Every MMORPG out there has a female avatar out there wearing armour that could not be called a thong because thongs cover more flesh.
But sex don't sell in games. Right. Sure, whatever.
That is why nude patches for games are rare.
Come on, sex sells EVERYTHING.
Ah, but maybe you are talking the sex act itself. Granted, that is an often unexplored area, in games at the old US of A, the puritan nation.
BUT sex is absent in lots of other US aimed entertainment as well. Their have been several childeren programs on the european continent with full frontal nudity, how many US programs?
Since the US is a very large market naturally most game publishers tend to cater to that market. This is not unusual at all, ever notice how every alien invasion, every disaster happens in the US?
European games on occasion are less restricted and the japanese have an entire industry of sex games.
The problem is indeed that if you got a great game, the sex just isn't that important, and if you don't, well then it just ain't a good game so why bother?
I remember a dutch movie that had full penetration shown plainly on camera (some movie about kidnappers in a military training ground, at one point a soldier driving by in a jeep is shot), even as a horny teen I could see the movie stank.
Because SEX also does NOT sell.
The promise of sex sells. In Jade Empire, and many games with romance options, the camera discreetly fades out to black when the characters hit the sheets. Would you like the game to continue? TO show the huffing and puffing? Movies don't.
So you got three things:
Sex sells, but only the promise of it.
I can play an MMO for hours on end but could I masturbate for that long? I am NOT 14 any more.